“Treating journalism as a criminal act deprives Salvadorans of essential information,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator. “Prosecutors should abandon these cases now and ensure El Faro journalists can safely report on matters of public interest.”

On May 3, El Faro reported that sources close to the attorney general’s office had warned of imminent warrants for seven of its reporters on two possible charges: apología del delito (“advocacy of crime”), which is punishable by six months to two years in prison, and agrupaciones ilícitas (“unlawful association”), which carries a five- to 10-year prison term. Both statutes are commonly used against suspected gang members.

Salvadoran authorities have detained some 85,000 people since March 2022, when Bukele announced a crackdown on gangs under a state of emergency, suspending constitutional rights and civil liberties.

El Faro editor-in-chief Óscar Martínez, a 2016 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award, told CPJ that the warrants followed a smear campaign by government officials accusing the outlet of being financed by gangs. On Tuesday, human rights lawyers with the Salvadoran Journalists Association formally requested that the prosecutor’s office provide information on the alleged investigation into El Faro’s journalists. 

CPJ emailed El Salvador’s attorney general’s office and the president’s office but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“We are critically concerned that the chaos in Haiti makes it nearly impossible for anyone — journalists included — to safely go about their daily lives,” said CPJ U.S., Canada, and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “Order must be restored, not least so that media outlets such as Radio Panic FM can provide news to Haitians and the world, rather than being hijacked to become mouthpieces for gangs.”

Privately owned Radio Panic FM’s director Joseph Allan Jr. told the Haiti-based SOS Journalists group, that the station in the central city of Mirebalais has been under the control of gang members since April 20.

“The gunmen have their own producer to operate the radio station and they played repeatedly a song recently released by their boss Jeff Larose,” the Haitian-Caribbean News Network reported.

Larose heads the Canaan faction of Viv Ansanm, or Living Together in Creole — an alliance of former rival gangs who joined forces in 2023 and took control of most of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.

Viv Ansanm attacked Mirebalais in March, forcing residents to flee. Journalist Roger Claudy Israël was taken hostage along with his brother. Both were later released; another journalist, Jean Christophe Collègue, was reported missing by his family.

Panic FM is the fourth Haitian broadcaster to be struck by gangs in the last month, following attacks on Radio Télévision Caraïbes (RTVC) and Mélodie FM, and TV Pluriel, in Port-au-Prince.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

On Friday, March 28, the Facebook page “Noticias Chiapas al ROJO” published the names of 17 journalists active in Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala, and accused them, without evidence, of working for the alleged leader of a local gang.

“It is deeply concerning that alleged criminals use social media to smear journalists, placing their lives at risk,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico Representative. “Mexican authorities must provide protection to reporters implicated by this Facebook page and find those responsible and bring them to justice.”

Two Tapachula journalists who spoke to CPJ by phone on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal, believe Noticias Chiapas al ROJO was created by a criminal gang to spread disinformation against rivals, authorities and journalists.

Social media profiles posing as legitimate news outlets to spread disinformation is common practice in Mexico, according to numerous journalists and government officials CPJ has spoken with over the past several years.

This places journalists at an immediate risk of being targeted by gangs; in 2022, Tijuana photographer Margarito Martínez was killed after being targeted by similar social media pages.

CPJ attempted to contact Facebook via email for comment but did not receive a reply. The offices of the Chiapas state prosecutor and Chiapas governor Eduardo Ramírez did not respond to calls by CPJ for comment. 

An official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which coordinates protection of reporters at risk, told CPJ on Friday, March 28, that his agency was in the process of evaluating the risk facing reporters named by the Facebook page. He asked not to be identified by name, as he is not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Residents of an informal Port Moresby settlement that was razed following the gang rape and murder of a woman by 20 men say they are being unfairly punished by Papua New Guinea authorities over alleged links to the crime.

Human rights advocates and the UN have condemned the killing but warned the eviction by police has raised serious concerns about collective punishment, violations of national law, police misconduct and governance failures.

A community spokesman said more than 500 people living at the settlement at the capital’s Baruni rubbish dump were forcibly evicted by the police in response to the killing of 32-year-old Margaret Gabriel on February 15.

• READ MORE: Nine more arrested in PNG for brutal kidnap, rape and murder of woman
• Other PNG crime reports

Authorities accuse the settlement residents, who are primarily migrants from the Goilala district in Central Province, of harboring some of the men involved in her murder.

Prime Minister James Marape condemned Gabriel’s death as “inhuman, barbaric” and a “defining moment for our nation to unite against crime, to take a stand against violence”, the day after the attack.

He assured every effort would be made to prosecute those responsible and his “unwavering support” for the removal of settlements like Baruni, calling them “breeding grounds for criminal elements who terrorise innocent people.”

Gabriel was one of three women killed in the capital that week.

Charged with rape, murder
Four men from Goilala district and two from Enga province, all aged between 18 and 29, appeared in a Port Moresby court on Monday on charges of her rape and murder.

The case has again put a spotlight again on gender-based violence in PNG and renewed calls for the government to find a long-term solution to Port Moresby’s impoverished settlements.

Dozens of families, some of whom have lived in the Baruni settlement for more than 40 years, were forced out of their homes on February 22 and are now sleeping under blue tarpaulins at a school sports oval on the outskirts of the capital.

“My people are innocent,” Peter Laiam, a community spokesman and school caretaker, told BenarNews, adding that police continued to harass the community at their new location.

“They told me I had to move these people out in two weeks’ time or they will shoot us.”

Laiam said a further six men from the settlement were suspected of involvement in Gabriel’s death, but had not been charged, and the community has fully cooperated with police on the matter, including naming the suspects.

Authorities however were treating the entire population as “trouble makers,” Laiam added.

“They also took cash and building materials like corrugated iron roofing for themselves” he said.

No police response
Senior police in Port Moresby did not respond to ongoing requests from BenarNews for reaction to the allegations.

Assistant Commissioner Benjamin Turi last week thanked the evicted settlers for information that led to the arrest of six suspects, The National newspaper reported.

Police Minister Peter Tsiamalili Junior defended the eviction at Baruni last month, telling EMTV News it was lawful and the settlement was on state-owned land.

Police used excavators and other heavy machinery to tear down houses at the Baruni settlement, with images showing some buildings on fire.

Residents say the resettlement site in Laloki lacks adequate water, sanitation and other facilities.

“They are running out of food,” Laiam said. “Last weekend they were washed out by the rain and their food supplies were finished.”

Separated from their gardens and unable to sell firewood, the families are surviving on food donations from local authorities, he said.

Human rights critics
The evictions have been criticised by human rights advocates, including Peterson Magoola, the UN Women Representative for PNG.

“We strongly condemn all acts of sexual and gender-based violence and call for justice for the victim,” he said in a statement last month.

“At the same time, collective punishment, forced evictions, and destruction of homes violate fundamental human rights and disproportionately harm vulnerable members of the community.”

Melanesian Solidarity, a local nonprofit, called on the government to ensure justice for both the murder victim and displaced families.

It said the evictions might have contravened international treaties and domestic laws that protect against unlawful property deprivation and mandate proper legal procedures for relocation.

The Baruni settlement, which is home primarily to migrants from Goilala district, was established with consent on the customary land of the Baruni people during the colonial era, according to Laiam.

Central Province Governor Rufina Peter defended the evicted settlers on national broadcaster NBC on February 20, and their contribution to the national capital.

“The Goilala people were here during pre-independence time. They are the ones who were the bucket carriers,” she said.

‘Knee jerk’ response
She also criticised the eviction by police as “knee jerk” and raised human rights concerns.

The Goilala community in Central Province, 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the capital, was the center of controversy in January when a trophy video of butchered body parts being displayed by a gang went viral, attracted erroneous ‘cannibalism’ reportage by the local media and sparked national and international condemnation.

The evictions at Baruni have touched off again a complex debate about crime and housing in PNG, the Pacific’s most populous nation.

Informal settlements have mushroomed in Port Moresby as thousands of people from the countryside migrate to the city in search of employment.

Critics say the impoverished settlements are unfit for habitation, contribute to the city’s frequent utility shortages, and harbour criminals.

Mass evictions have been ordered before, but the government has failed to enact any meaningful policies to address their rapid growth across the city.

While accurate population data is hard to find in PNG, the United Nations Population Fund estimates that the number of people living in Port Moresby is about 513,000.

Lack basic infrastructure
At least half of them are thought to live in informal settlements, which lack basic infrastructure like water, electricity and sewerage, according to 2022 research by the PNG National Research Institute.

A shortage of affordable housing and high rental prices have caused a mismatch between demand and supply.

Melanesian Solidarity said the government needed to develop a national housing strategy to prevent the rise of informal settlements.

“This eviction is a wake-up call for the government to implement sustainable urban planning and housing reforms rather than resorting to forced removals,” it said in a statement.

“We stand with the affected families and demand justice, accountability, and humane solutions for all Papua New Guineans.”

Stefan Armbruster, Sue Ahearn and Harry Pearl contributed to this story. Republished from BenarNews with permission. However, it is the last report from BenarNews as the editors have announced a “pause” in publication due to the US administration withholding funds.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

British society has been dealing with organised child exploitation through grooming gangs for an extended period. Official data contradicts media perceptions about who engages in these criminal activities by showing Pakistani men are not the main offenders. Official Home Office data indicates that defendants facing child sexual abuse prosecution in England and Wales are predominantly white since their number reaches 88 percent. News reports on offences by South Asian individuals receive unusually high attention from media outlets thus perpetuating racial misconceptions that deepen societal rifts.

The Origins of a Racialized Narrative

Forces of public discussion concerning grooming gangs grew stronger as three important cases occurred in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford during the early 2010s. Policing and child protection institutions revealed organisational breakdowns in their investigations while media discussion primarily focused on the racial backgrounds of the offenders. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) produces reports showing child exploitation happens throughout all racial and social backgrounds but Pakistani and South Asian men still face political accusations as chief perpetrators.

The selective nature of this presentation has occurred previously. A series of investigative reports from The Times during 2011 identified Pakistani men as responsible for most grooming incidents. The overall issue of child sexual abuse transcends specific ethnic groups even though select cases linked South Asian offenders to the crime. Statistics from the National Crime Agency (NCA) confirm that white men carry out most cases of organised child exploitation but these crimes remain substantially underreported in the media.

How the Stereotype Affects Pakistani Families

The institutionalised stereotyping of Pakistani families in the United Kingdom has produced severe negative results. The students of Pakistani descent experience school discrimination through stereotype abuse which links them to sex exploitation gangs. A 2020 Runnymede Trust report documented Pakistani students who described teacher and peer bullying together with being labelled as “rapists” and experiencing suspicion. Community members and employers also share the same prejudice toward Pakistani families that starts in educational institutions.

Research shows doses of bigotry against Muslim communities have grown because of recent media accounts. Statistics gathered by Tell MAMA demonstrate that reports about South Asian male grooming incidents led to an increase in Islamophobic incidents. Social isolation and vandalism attacks against Pakistani businesses and their families can be found in certain areas.

Systemic Failures in Addressing Child Exploitation

The genuine matter at hand concerns institutional missteps rather than the ongoing focus on ethnicity in political discussions. Vulnerable children received failed protection from both the police force and social services departments and government agencies because these institutions did not respond to abuse reports because of limited resources and poor management. The Jay Report (2014) uncovered that agency authorities neglected multiple reports of child exploitation in the Rotherham child abuse scandal for more than a decade.

The collective resources should move away from ethnic considerations so they focus on enhancing child protection legislation while training police forces and improving victim assistance services. The Children’s Commissioner has reported significant issues in both the reporting and handling of child sexual abuse incidents regardless of the racial background of abusers.

Why Pakistanis Are Targeted in This Narrative

The way grooming gang discussion has turned racial shows how British society generally views Asians and Muslims. Right-wing media together with politicians exploit this topic to advance immigration control measures and strengthen Muslim community monitoring. The English Defence League (EDL) uses Pakistani and Muslim communities as a focal point to rally their members while they organise protests that lead to violent incidents.

Throughout history the United Kingdom tends to blame minority communities for addressing broader social issues. The criminal investigation of Pakistani men for grooming gangs matches historical patterns of moral panics that previously targeted black muggers during the 1970s and Irish immigrants throughout the 20th century. Extending responsibility to an individual ethnicity creates diversion from institutional breakdowns that exist in police organisations and welfare agencies.

A Call for Evidence-Based Solutions

To combat child exploitation effectively, the UK must adopt a zero-tolerance policy that is not influenced by racial biases. Recommendations include:

• Improved police training to handle child exploitation cases effectively.

• Better data collection on grooming gangs that avoids racial profiling.

• Stronger victim support services to ensure survivors receive adequate care.

• Accountability for institutional failures, including oversight of law enforcement agencies.

The UK is implementing key recommendations to combat child exploitation effectively. These include improved police training, better data collection, stronger victim support services, and accountability for institutional failures. Police training should focus on recognising signs of exploitation and understanding grooming complexities. Data collection methods should focus on behaviours and patterns, avoiding racial profiling. Stronger victim support services should ensure survivors receive adequate care and support. Independent oversight bodies should monitor law enforcement and other institutions. Additional strategies include community engagement and awareness campaigns, partnership and collaboration between law enforcement, social services, schools, and community organisations, and the development and enforcement of robust legal frameworks. These strategies aim to move towards a more equitable approach to combating child exploitation. For more insights, refer to the UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner’s report.

National authorities in the UK execute essential recommendations to overcome child exploitation better. The UK is adopting four primary measures to enhance child exploitation combat through upgraded police teaching combined with better statistical data acquisition and enhanced victim care programs and institutional oversight systems. The training curriculum for police officers must teach them to detect exploitation indicators as well as complex grooming procedures. Data collection systems should analyse behavioural activities and detect patterns instead of adapting racially biased approaches. The delivery of victim support should achieve complete care and support for survivors through improved service approaches.

External supervision institutions need to monitor both law enforcement departments along with other institutions. Effective child exploitation prevention strategies necessitate active collaboration between law enforcement, social services, schools, and community organisations, as well as community outreach and public education programs. Strict legal systems are also necessary. Such measures work toward building a more fair method of fighting child exploitation. The complete UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner’s report contains additional detailed information about this subject.

Conclusion: Separating Fact from Fiction

The obsessive focus on Pakistani males in grooming gang stories produces misleading information which proves detrimental to both social harmony and genuine investigation. Racial stereotyping exacerbates social tensions, obscures institutional shortcomings, and places an undue burden on communities that bear no responsibility. The UK needs to stop blaming racial groups for its child protection problems while establishing complete child safety measures that approach the fundamental causes of child exploitation. Society guarantees child protection for children of every background through such measures alone.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Syed Salman Mehdi.

When the U.S. government deported 177 Venezuelans on Feb. 20, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security alleged that 80 of the deportees were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

U.S. news outlets report that members have set up shop in at least 16 states and are “wreaking havoc on communities across the nation.”

According to Fox News, in February 2025 there was an “infestation” of Tren de Aragua members in an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado.

Suspected Tren de Aragua members have been arrested in Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, California, Texas and other states.

The U.S. State Department went so far as to designate Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization in an effort to stop “the campaigns of violence and terror committed by international cartels and transnational organizations.”

There is little reliable information about Tren de Aragua – but no shortage of sensationalist news reports and Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids claiming to target them.

We are sociologists who have spent a combined 37 years researching gangs, crime and policing in Venezuela. Our research in Venezuela, and our colleagues’ research in other countries, suggests that incarceration and mass deportations of Venezuelans living in the U.S., whether they have ties to the group or not, will likely strengthen Tren de Aragua rather than cripple it.

Indeed, we have already seen how these strategies contributed to the expansion of street gangs in El Salvador and Honduras by creating new opportunities for members to network and become more organized.

What is Tren de Aragua?

According to investigative journalists and a handful of academic studies, Tren de Aragua was initially founded by Hector “El Niño” Guerrero and two other men in 2014. The three men were imprisoned in Tocorón prison in the state of Aragua.

By 2017, Tren de Aragua began to be known as a “megabanda,” a category the local press in Venezuela use to refer to large organized criminal groups. The term arose to highlight the size of some street gangs, which at the time was unprecedented in Venezuela.

Since its beginning, the gang has depended heavily on extortion. It also sells street drugs, but that has been a much less important source of revenue for it.

Tren de Aragua’s growth surged as a result of mass incarceration policies that began under Venezuela’s former President Hugo Chávez and expanded under current President Nicolás Maduro. Incarceration rates began to increase in 2009 and were exacerbated by police raids deployed in 2010 in marginalized neighborhoods across the country. Venezuela’s prisons became filled with young, poor men.

Crowded together in inhumane conditions, the men began to organize into prison gangs with clear hierarchies. They accumulated vast profits by charging prisoners fees for food, use of space and protection from inmate violence. They also opened and ran businesses, including a club, inside Tocorón prison.

Members of different gangs in and outside the prison also began to communicate and share information about criminal activities such as kidnapping and extortion. This strengthened social networks and expanded their illegal enterprises.

Tren de Aragua eventually took control of Tocorón prison as the government became unable to manage daily life inside its walls. It had become one of the largest and best organized gangs in Venezuela.

Criminal enterprise grows

Since 2014, an economic and humanitarian crisis has devastated Venezuela, causing many Venezuelans to migrate.

Venezuela had one of the highest displacement rates in the world between 2014 and 2018, when at least 3 million people left the country.

Tren de Aragua, still based in the Tocorón prison at that time, took advantage of this mass migration. It expanded the group’s business portfolio to include human trafficking and sexual exploitation of Venezuelan female migrants in Chile, Colombia and Peru.

It’s unclear how far beyond Venezuela Tren de Aragua has spread. While the group has certainly expanded operations into the Latin American countries mentioned above, research shows common criminals have posed as Tren de Aragua members in both Colombia and Chile.

Moreover, the arrest of alleged Tren de Aragua members for committing crimes in the U.S. and other countries does not mean that the gang has set up shop in those places. Gang members, same as non-gang members, migrate during crises. They may continue to commit crimes in new places after they arrive. However, it’s important to note that immigration in the U.S. is consistently linked with decreases – not increases – in both violent crime and property crime.

Even some local police departments have questioned the gang’s expansion into the U.S.

In Aurora, police refuted both the mayor’s and President Donald Trump’s claims about the apartment complex being taken over by the gang. And the New York Police Department recently reported that suspected Tren de Aragua members there are largely focused on snatching mobile phones and robbing department stores – hardly the crimes of a transnational criminal empire or terrorist organization.

Making matters worse

Deportations do not address the urgent situation faced by many migrants who leave their homelands in search of a better, safer future.

When governments prioritize the spectacle of deportations to deal with migration, they contribute to the expansion of even more resilient networks of criminal enterprises.

Recent history bears this out.

In El Salvador in the 1990s and early 2000s, incarceration, deportations and repressive policing policies contributed to the evolution of youth street gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, into transnational extortion rackets that spread across Central America.

These same policies could also contribute to the growth of Tren de Aragua within Latin America.

Prison isolates large groups of excluded and marginalized people and constrains them to brutal conditions. This enables and encourages the social networks that fuel illegal markets and criminal activity beyond the walls of prisons.

Rising xenophobia

Another harmful outcome of the policies we have discussed here is that they may fuel xenophobia toward and criminalization of Venezuelan immigrants living in the U.S.

This closes off opportunities and harms people already devastated by economic, political and humanitarian crises in their home country.

Venezuelans have responded with their characteristically incisive and biting humor.

Many have used social media to parody news outlets and political speeches, and Venezuelans regularly post memes and videos that mock the automatic association made between them and Tren de Aragua.

The satiric news site El Chigüire Bipolar posted stories titled “The United States confirms that Venezuelans are Tren de Aragua members from birth” and “ICE agents detain newborn that might be Tren de Aragua leader in the future.”

Meanwhile, recent cuts in U.S. foreign aid to countries with large Venezuelan populations, such as Colombia and Peru, will likely exacerbate the migration crisis by constraining opportunities for Venezuelans.

Future waves of migrants will be easy prey for criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua, which has turned human trafficking into a lucrative business. And with current policies of cutbacks, incarceration and repression, Tren de Aragua will likely continue to grow and fill its coffers.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post The Origins of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua and Why US Policies May Only Make it Stronger appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Verónica Zubillaga – Rebecca Hanson.

In a separate attack, suspected gang members burned the home of Lookens Jean-Baptiste, a reporter with radio Tropic FM, on November 5 in Port-au-Prince’s Fort National district. “They found out I was a journalist, and they think we all have connections with the police,” Jean-Baptiste told CPJ.

“We are concerned by the surge in gang violence in Haiti and general instability following the collapse of Prime Minister Garry Conille’s government, which have both made the already tenuous situation in Haiti all the more dangerous for the country’s reporters,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna, from New York. “We are concerned by the recent attack against journalist Wandy Charles and the burning of the home of reporter Lookens Jean-Baptiste. Journalists must be able to report on the recent surge in violence without fear of gang retaliation.”

Charles, editor-in-chief of the independent local media outlet Vent Bef, told CPJ that he was wearing his flak jacket marked “Press,” but he quickly removed it, fearing the shooters were targeting him for his work as a journalist.

“The gangs don’t want us to criticize them or give a voice to the victims, or the police, or the government,” Charles told CPJ. “The bandits have their own propaganda organ, and the press often goes against what they say — it bothers them.”

His brother was treated at a hospital for gunshot wounds to the arm and leg, Charles told CPJ, adding that his brother was given a blood transfusion and is now in stable condition.

Local media reported that the shooters were members of the Kraze Baryè gang led by Vitel’homme Innocent, who is wanted by the FBI for kidnapping and murder.

Charles told CPJ that gangs have attacked his family at least four other times, most recently in March when their home was ransacked, looted, and then set on fire.

In recent years, the unrest in Haiti has made it one of the most dangerous countries for journalists. Haiti ranked No. 1 in CPJ’s 2024 impunity index, a ranking of nations where journalists’ murderers are most likely to go free.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“We are very concerned about the threats made against AyiboPost’s editor-in-chief Widlore Mérancourt by the Haitian gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier,” said CPJ U.S., Canada, and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “Haitian journalists are already working in unimaginably difficult conditions. They should not be intimidated simply for doing their jobs and covering matters of public importance.” 

In the September 18 article, Mérancourt, editor-in-chief of the independent Haitian news site AyiboPost, described how Cherizier posted on his WhatsApp channel on September 14 a video, which has since been removed, bragging about the gifts. Mérancourt questioned the ethics of providing gifts to Cherizier, who heads an alliance of gangs called the G9 Family and has been sanctioned by the U.S. and the United Nations for alleged human rights atrocities.

In a September 25 video, Cherizier threatened Mérancourt, saying; “I’m coming for you. Mark my words: there are people you don’t want to mess with. You could be in your bathroom and a car could come crashing into you.”

Mérancourt, who is also a contributor to the Washington Post, told CPJ that he feared for his safety and urged the Haitian government and its international partners “to protect all journalists in Haiti, end the culture of impunity, and ensure that those responsible for wrongdoing are held accountable.”

Reuters, one of the world’s largest multimedia news providers, was quoted as telling AyiboPost that it has “a strict code of conduct” for its staff and the gifts were “an error of judgment” that was under investigation.

Haiti is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for the media and ranks third on CPJ’s 2023 Global Impunity Index, which spotlights countries where the killers of journalists are most likely to go free.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

But now Le Nouvelliste’s survival — and that of more independent media outlets in the country — may be in grave danger after gang rule has descended the island nation into virtual lawlessness following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

Besides a handful of major TV, radio and print outlets, Haiti has hundreds of small radio and TV stations, many of them operating on social media platforms with tiny budgets and only a handful of mostly freelance reporters.

Many media outlets have been forced to cut staff due to falling advertising and others say they are close to being forced out of business.

Headquartered in Haiti’s capital, Port au-Prince, Le Nouvelliste has had “difficult situations” before, said publisher Max Chauvet, 73, the grandson of the paper’s founder. 

“But never like this,” Chauvet added. “It’s the first time in our history that the paper’s offices were physically taken over.” 

On April 25, suspected gang members occupied and looted Le Nouvelliste’s offices. The incident followed a March attack on a prominent broadcaster, Radio Télévision Caraïbes, which was forced to leave its studio in downtown Port-au-Prince. Also in April, the office of the National Press, which prints the Le Moniteur government bulletin, was attacked. 

And in March, the main gate and windows of Radio Télévision Caraïbes were hit by stray bullets. No casualties were reported. But the owner decided to move offices as a precaution. 

Gang members have spread all over the city since launching a coordinated offensive against the government in February, including an attack on two large prisons which resulted in the escape of more than 4,000 inmates. Several universities and hospitals, as well as the National Library of Haiti, have all been looted. 

After Le Nouvelliste’s offices were occupied in April, the paper was forced to stop printing. The paper remains online for its audience of 110,000 free subscribers, as well as its 528,000 followers on X, formerly Twitter, and 590,000 followers on Facebook. 

Chauvet said he didn’t believe that the looting of Le Nouvelliste’s offices was in response to its reporting but rather a result of the “absence of the state.” That vacuum “has allowed looters to take advantage of the deterioration of security” across the city, he said. 

Chauvet told CPJ he was waiting for a full inventory of the items seized and destroyed but feared the paper may never recover. 

Attacks on journalists

The crisis facing media outlets in Haiti is the result of attacks by gangs on journalists and their offices, as well as the economic impact of widespread insecurity.

At least six Haitian journalists have been murdered in direct reprisal for their work since Moïse’s 2021 assassination. Haiti ranked as the world’s third-worst nation in CPJ’s 2023 Global Impunity Index, which measures where killers of journalists are most likely to go unpunished. 

CPJ has also documented numerous kidnappings of journalists in recent months and attacks outside the capital, including Radio Antarctique in the town of Liancourt whose studio was burned down by gang members in 2023. Its director Roderson Elias left Haiti and the outlet has ceased operations.  

In recent years, several Le Nouvelliste journalists have been attacked. Prominent investigative journalist and editor Roberson Alphonse survived an assassination attempt in 2022 that left him hospitalized for eight days with gunshot wounds to the chest, stomach, and arms. He has since left the country. 

Alphonse was the second of the paper’s top reporters to be forced into exile, after the departure of Robenson Geffrard in 2022 due to death threats.

Advertising has dried up

The prolonged insecurity has also hit media owners hard financially as advertising from local businesses has dried up. Chauvet and other media owners worry how much longer they can keep operating, as they also grapple with competition from online news sources and social media influencers.

“There is no revenue to pay staff,” Chauvet said, adding that he had to lay off some staff and wasn’t sure how long the company could meet its payroll and stave off bankruptcy. “It’s an existential crisis.” 

Chauvet is considering the option of a paywall, but fears driving away low-income subscribers. 

“Countless media outlets have ceased broadcasting, reduced their airtime, dismissed staff, or are surviving hand to mouth,” Frantz Duval, editor of Le Nouvelliste, wrote in an April editorial marking the paper’s anniversary. 

“Insecurity has reduced economic activity, and this has had an impact on advertising, the only source of revenue for the vast majority of the press … The few media companies that receive subscriptions are seeing their customer base shrink daily. Families can’t afford to pay for information and entertainment. In all sectors, customers and employees are leaving, weakening the ecosystem.”

Sleeping on a mattress in the office

After 34 years in business, Radio Télé Galaxie, one of Haiti’s early FM band radio stations, has been on and off the air since April. 

“We are trying to stay active but mostly by doing social media,” director Jean Robert Jean-Bart told CPJ. Due to financial challenges, the station was forced to lay off 90% of its 50 staff. 

“It’s been 34 years of hard work and investment, but our savings have run out,” said Jean-Bart. 

One of his staff, Arnold Junior Pierre, was forced to flee his home in a gang-controlled neighborhood last August and has been sleeping on a mattress in the office ever since.

“I live in my workspace, which makes my situation very difficult. But I’m grateful to have somewhere to sleep,” Pierre told CPJ. “I continue to pursue my profession with passion. But we are all having to beg for survival. It’s a sad reality,” he said.

Chauvet told CPJ he worried that money from organized crime and drug traffickers could be used to influence media coverage. “In the absence of formal financial revenue, there is a lot of dirty money in the country which could find its way into the new online media,” he said.

Last month, a U.N.-backed contingent of 400 police officers from Kenya arrived in Haiti to help restore law and order and pave the way for new elections. But Chauvet worries it may be too late to save many local businesses. 

“If there is no economic recovery soon, it will be too late. What Haiti needs is a Marshall Plan,” said Chauvet, referring to the massive economic reconstruction effort in Europe after World War II.

In April, more than 90 Haitian journalists, backed by the press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders, called on Haiti’s new transitional council to protect the media, saying that they live in constant fear of being attacked, kidnapped, or murdered.

“Doing our job has become so dangerous that a daily act of heroism is needed to keep going,” the appeal said.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by David C. Adams.

Roubens, 42, is a veteran fixer, assisting foreign journalists and social media personalities seeking to report on Haiti’s gang violence. At the time of his kidnapping, Roubens was working with a U.S. YouTube personality, Adisson Pierre Maalouf, who goes by the name “Arab” on social media.

Roubens told CPJ that he was hired by Maalouf to arrange an interview with Haitian gang leader, Jimmy Chérizier, also known as Barbecue. 

Roubens and Maalouf were driving from Cap Haitian, in the northern region of the country, when they were intercepted by members of a rival gang, 400 Mawozo, led by Joseph Wilson, known in Haitian Creole as Lanmò Sanjou, or “Death Can Come Any Day.”

Roubens believes they were “set up” by corrupt police officers who sold information to the gang members about their transportation details as they were entering the capital. 

Roubens and Maalouf were held at gunpoint by men armed with M-16s and shotguns and were forced to record videos with Wilson, pretending “to act friendly with him,” Roubens told The New York Times. “That was the only way to get out of that situation,” he said. 

Wilson is wanted in the United States in connection with the kidnapping of 17 Christian missionaries and their children, who were held for ransom in 2021. Wilson was also sanctioned last year by the U.S. Treasury Department, and the FBI has offered a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

During the 17 days they were held, Roubens said they managed to keep their spirits up by praying together. “We shared the same bathroom; we shared the same soap,” he said. 

Roubens and Maalouf were released after Maalouf’s family paid an undisclosed ransom. A second ransom was demanded, but Wilson dropped his demand after he apparently came under pressure from Chérizier to release the pair, according to Roubens.

Roubens told CPJ that he was traumatized and planned to take a break from his work. “I will not go to the red zone any longer, I am done with it,” he said, saying he regretted putting his family through “the pain they had to go through during the time I was away.” 

Roubens also confirmed that gang members offered to release him early on, but he chose to stay with Maalouf to help secure his release. “They said, we don’t want any money from you. We already know you have no money. But this white man, we should make money from him so that we can buy guns.”

400 Mawozo leader Wilson could not be reached for comment.

Since the assassination of the country’s president in 2021, Haiti has been beset by gang rule and violence and currently has no recognized authority since acting President and Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigned on March 12, 2024. In 2023 Haiti joined CPJ’s list of countries where killers of journalists are likely to go free, ranking as the world’s third worst impunity offender.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Haiti is under a state of emergency after the country’s gangs freed thousands of people from the country’s largest prisons and are reportedly uniting to bring down Haiti’s de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who has yet to return to the country since he traveled to Kenya last week to discuss a deal to bring a U.N. force of 1,000 Kenyan police to the island. “It is a desolation that we are feeling. It is a terror that we are living,” says Haitian pro-democracy advocate Monique Clesca about escalating gang violence that has already displaced thousands of Haitians. “We have been terrorized for the last 30 months of Ariel Henry’s government,” she says, emphasizing “the Biden administration has its hands in the bloodshed.” We are also joined by researcher Jake Johnston, who traces the relationship between U.S. intervention and Haiti’s unrest, “a process stoked and perpetuated by the international community, and namely the United States,” and we speak with Kenyan MP Otiende Amollo, who opposes the plan to send Kenyan “peacekeepers” to Haiti, calling it a move “that flies in the face of the rule of law.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress announced on Tuesday that the Tianjin Municipal People’s Congress had "decided to accept" Qin's resignation as a delegate.

The announcement came as the name of China's missing former defense minister Li Shangfu was scrubbed from a list of top leaders of the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission published on the Defense Ministry’s official website, Caixin Global reported.

Li was fired from his post as defense minister on Oct. 24, 2023, with no explanation given. A number of senior leaders of the People's Liberation Army's Rocket Corps, including the head of China's nuclear arsenal, had also been fired by President Xi Jinping in July.

Qin, 57, has been absent from public view since he met with the foreign ministers of Sri Lanka and Vietnam, and with the Russian deputy foreign minister in Beijing on June 25, 2023.

But the government has yet to shed any light on his fate or his whereabouts, despite a storm of media and social media speculation.

Qin's disappearance came amid widespread and unconfirmed rumors that he was under investigation for having an affair with Phoenix TV reporter Fu Xiaotian.

Soon afterwards, his name was scrubbed from the foreign ministry’s web pages and archive of news releases.

A Xi Jinping favorite

Qin had been catapulted into the role of foreign minister as a Xi Jinping favorite and had only served for seven months, after making a name for himself as a "wolf warrior" diplomat.

His ouster — which was formalized with his resignation in January — came amid several other high-profile sackings of senior officials by Xi.

Xi replaced Li Yuchao as commander of the People's Liberation Army Rocket Corps — which controls the country's nuclear missiles — in July, as state media reported that Li and his former deputies Zhang Zhenzhong and Liu Guangbin had been placed under investigation by the Chinese Communist Party's disciplinary arm, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

Li Shangfu was reportedly being investigated for corrupt procurement of military equipment after being out of the public eye since Aug. 29, along with several other senior officials from the Chinese military's procurement unit, media reports said at the time.

The sackings are believed to be part of a broader effort to reduce security vulnerabilities amid China’s increasing competition with the United States and its allies.

Xi on Tuesday also signed an executive order that will see the Law on Safeguarding State Secrets take effect from May 1.

The law was revised and adopted by the National People's Congress Standing Committee on Feb. 27, 2024, according to announcements on official websites and media.

According to state broadcaster CCTV, the committee "recommended the implementation of a declassification period for personnel with access to confidential information who leave their posts."

All government departments and state-owned enterprises will be required under the law to "determine the confidentiality level" of state secrets they work with, and implement new rules about managing a "declassification" period for employees who leave their posts, including a travel ban.

"During the declassification period, personnel who have access to secrets are not allowed to work or leave the country ... nor are they allowed to disclose state secrets in any way," CCTV reported. 

Similar measures may be necessary to safeguard industrial secrets that could "cause certain adverse effects" if leaked, the report said.

'Deepens state powers'

In a Nov. 3 commentary on the draft law that was revealed in October, the China-Britain Business Council said the law "deepens state powers" and had sparked concerns among foreign businesses and individuals in China, particularly in the wake of raids of foreign consultancy firms Bain & Co. and Mintz Group earlier in 2023.

According to the October version of the draft law, state employees with access to state secrets will require permission before traveling abroad, including for a period of time after they leave the job or retire. during which time they may be barred from taking another job.

The National Administration of State Secret Protection will have expanded powers to investigate state secret-related cases, including the ability to check and confiscate files and devices, and to question staff, while tech products that are used to protect state secrets will be regularly checked.

"Some argue that terms in the law such as 'state secrets,' 'national security,' 'national interests' and even 'employees' remain poorly defined and could thus be interpreted by those enforcing the law," the China-Britain Business Council said, echoing similar concerns expressed by European business leaders about the Counterespionage Law, which was amended last year.

China's Ministry of State Security has said the criticism of both laws is unfounded.

The National People's Congress, China's rubber-stamp parliament, is to convene its annual session in early March and is expected to focus on the country’s ailing economy.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Heung Yeung for RFA Cantonese.

The compound was the site of an online gambling den in Myanmar’s Tachileik city in eastern Shan state. 

The region comprising northern Thailand, eastern Myanmar and southern Laos is known as the Golden Triangle, notorious for gambling, trafficking and fraud.

A resident declining to be named for safety reasons told Radio Free Asia that the 1G1-7 Hotel in Tachileik’s San Sai Kha neighborhood, where the casino crackdown occurred, is a long-standing institution in the city.

“The raid and arrests at the casino, which was opened behind the 1G1-7 Hotel, has been open for about a decade as a casino,” he said. “It was raided and people were arrested in the morning.”

Junta soldiers and police arrested Myanmar, Thai and Chinese nationals, locals said. They are currently in custody, but no further details about their location or identity are known. 

Another Tachileik resident said there are hundreds of online gambling businesses in the 11 neighborhoods of the city and in its surrounding villages. Many operate in homes and hotels, he said. 

“Houses are entirely rented, and the hotels were rented out by floors for operating [online casinos],” he said. “Chinese and Thai nationals are also involved.”

Online money scamming gangs often disguise their operations as casinos, locals said. In 2023, more than 40,000 Chinese nationals were deported from Shan state for staying illegally in Myanmar and working in illegal businesses and scam centers.

This is the first time police have cracked down on scam centers in Tachileik, locals said. 

The junta has not officially released any information on Friday's arrests. RFA reached out to Shan state’s junta spokesperson Khun Thein Maung, but he did not respond by the time of publication. 

However, pro-military channels on the social messaging app Telegram shared that the people arrested in Tachileik were committing online fraud as part of an organization known as “Kyar Pyant.” It reported the Chinese gang, which specializes in online fraud, was raided by junta security forces.

State-owned newspapers reported on Feb. 9 that more than 50,000 foreigners, mostly made up of Chinese nationals, were transferred back to their respective countries for illegally staying in Myanmar from Oct. 5, 2023 to Feb. 8, 2024.

Some 48,803 Chinese, 1,071 Vietnamese, 537 Thai, 133 Malaysian, 20 Korean, and 18 Lao nationals were transferred, the statement said. 

In November, 19 South Koreans were rescued by junta forces after being forced to work in Tachileik in an illegal business. 

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nikita Mazurov.

The 44-year-old journalist with the independent broadcaster Radio Télé Zip said he was shot at by two armed men on motorbikes who tried to block the road as he was driving home on September 29 in the Croix-des-Bouquets suburb on the northern outskirts of the city.

He believed the assailants were gang members and told CPJ he was later contacted by a member of the feared Mawozo 400 gang, who demanded payment of $1,700 as “protection money.”

Dorvil went into hiding but says he was attacked again on October 9 by half a dozen armed men while he was trying to visit his home.

“They tried to kidnap me. They hit the car and told me to get out. I refused,” he told CPJ in a phone call. He said one of the men fired a bullet through his windshield before he was able to get away.

Both incidents were reported to the police and the local judiciary visited the scene of the crime to speak to Dorvil, according to documents provided by Dorvil.

A witness, Wilmare Etienne, who is Dorvil’s brother-in-law, also provided a notarized statement in which he said that government collusion with the armed gangs had created a “general state of fear” that left Dorvil no option but to leave the country. “There is no guarantee of safety for anyone doing their job as a journalist in Haiti; their life is always in great danger,” Etienne added.

On November 7, Dorvil left the country and sent his family to live with relatives in another part of Haiti. “I can’t go back to Haiti right now. I’ll be killed if they find me,” he told CPJ.

For the last two years, armed gangs have taken control of large parts of the capital, including Croix-des-Bouquets, terrorizing the population with impunity after police and judicial authorities were forced to abandon their posts. In several cases, journalists have been swept up in the gang violence. At least six journalists were killed in Haiti in connection with their work in 2022 and 2023, placing Haiti as the third-worst country on CPJ’s 2023 Global Impunity Index.

In Dorvil’s case, it was not clear whether the attacks were related to his journalism. While his reporting occasionally involved criticism of the gangs, he was never directly threatened because of his coverage.

Dorvil said he began receiving threats from the Mawozo 400 in late 2022 while carrying out construction on his house. “The gangs think journalists are rich and they demand money as a tax on people who live in the neighborhoods under their control,” said Dorvil, who previously worked as a press officer for the Ministry of Public Health. “They need the money to buy guns and pay their members,” he added.

The head of the Mawozo 400 gang, Joseph Wilson, alias Lanmò San Jou, is wanted by the FBI for his alleged role in the kidnapping of a group of Christian missionaries from the U.S. and Canada in October 2021.

Dorvil provided CPJ with a handwritten letter he received from the gang leader in late 2022, accompanied by two bullets. In it, Wilson informed Dorvil that he knew where he lived, and that he and his family would be killed if he did not pay the money.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Several hours after setting out, Kersaint’s body was found in the street with a bullet in his forehead, sprawled next to another corpse believed to be a victim of the shooting Kersaint had set out to investigate. 

Kersaint, a 31-year-old father to a baby daughter, worked for Radio-Télé INUREP, an online media outlet run by a local university. “He lived and breathed journalism, it was his entire life. That’s why we hired him,” Fabien Iliophène, the rector of INUREP university, told CPJ in an interview.

There is little chance that Kersaint’s killers will ever be brought to justice. Haiti is in crisis, its economy battered by natural disasters and gang violence. The July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse dashed any lingering hopes for a new democratic era more than three decades after the popular rebellion that ended the dictatorship of the Duvalier family in 1986. Moise’s assassination left a political void that allowed gangs to seize control of large parts of the capital and journalists forced to work in what lawyers and media experts say is a climate of almost total lawlessness. The result is a press corps that tries to report against all odds, but is often terrified into self-censorship. 

“It was a deliberate and planned crime,” Bazile said. “It’s possible that he wanted to film the murder scene and, not wanting to give the camera away to nullify any possible trace of evidence, he was executed.”

The United Nations office in Haiti, BINUH, said in a recent report that impunity remains widespread in Haiti, with the judicial system plagued by corruption, political interference, and strikes, resulting in few being held accountable for the violence. With nowhere to turn, some Haitians have taken justice into their own hands, forming a movement known as Bwa Kale, or “peeled wood” to punish alleged gang members. 

“I have never seen the situation as bad as it is now,” the U.N. Independent Expert on Haiti, William O’Neill, told CPJ after returning from a 10-day fact-finding trip to the country this summer. 

Haiti’s National Police lacks the funds and resources to take on the gangs, with only an estimated 10,000 active officers serving a country of more than 11 million. In a last-ditch effort to restore security, the U.N. Security Council voted on October 2 to send a multinational armed force to Haiti for one year, though it is unclear how soon it will be deployed. 

This summer, the gangs expanded their territorial control into residential neighborhoods such as Carrefour-Feuilles, where thousands of residents were forced to flee, in some cases after their homes were set afire. CPJ has documented the cases of several journalists who fled the area, including at least two who said their homes were destroyed by arson.

Gang violence has also spread to other parts of the country. In July, the owner and staff of Radio Antarctique in Liancourt, in Haiti’s central Artibonite region were forced to flee after gang members attacked the station, setting fire to its studios as part of an arson attack on the town. Police had fled the town weeks earlier and only recently returned, according to Radio Antarctique’s director and founder Roderson Elias. He told CPJ that the station remains off the air and gangs continue to control the town.  

“We are on our own, helpless against the gangs,” said Elias, who has since left the country. “One day I would like to return, but right now we can’t count on our local authorities to protect us,” he added.

In addition to the five journalists murdered in connection with their work since the presidential assassination, CPJ has documented an additional four journalists killed in the same time period. (In one of the four cases, the death was work-related; in the others, CPJ is still trying to confirm whether the killings were related to journalism.) 

One case, the fatal shooting by police of photojournalist Romelson Vilcin in October 2022 while covering a protest, resulted in a rare investigation by the Inspector General of the police, which recommended the officer involved be sanctioned. CPJ contacted the Inspector General’s office but has not received a reply about the final decision in the case.

Vilcin’s death occurred a few days after an attack on another journalist, Roberson Alphonse, the news editor at the country’s oldest daily newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, who is also a radio and television journalist on Magik9 and Télé 20.

Alphonse survived what the Miami Herald described as an “apparent assassination attempt” while driving in the Delmas 40B neighborhood early in the morning of October 25, when his vehicle was hit by several bullets as he drove to work. He was shot in the chest, stomach, and arms, and spent eight days in hospital. He said he was questioned by police investigators about the attack while in hospital but heard nothing from authorities after that.

He has since left the country. “I have to go back, but I don’t know when it will be safe. I can’t allow anyone to silence my voice,” Alphonse told CPJ. 

Multiple journalists have been kidnapped in recent months. CPJ spoke to several who were released and they said that they were not aware of police conducting investigations into the incidents. 

Legal protections for journalists in Haiti have never been strong, but local journalists say they have never encountered a more dismal situation. 

“The Haitian justice system has historically been ineffective in Haiti,” according to Widlore Mérancourt, editor-in-chief of online news site AyiboPost. He noted previous high-profile incidents involving journalists, like the still-unsolved 2000 killing of Jean Dominique or the 2018 disappearance of Vladjimir Legagneur. “However, the system is now facing an overwhelming crisis,” he told CPJ, saying the assassination of Moïse had pushed the country to the brink of total breakdown, including the judicial system. 

“With no functioning parliament, gangs have taken control of entire courts, judges have fled the country for their safety, and court proceedings are irregular … which translates into more preventive detention, no thorough investigations and almost complete impunity for those who attack or kill members of the press,” said Mérancourt, who also reports for The Washington Post from Haiti. 

In the case of Kersaint, several sources told CPJ that he was likely murdered because of his efforts to document a spate of recent crimes in Carrefour-Feuilles, a strategically located neighborhood hotly contested by rival gangs and the police.

Kersaint’s family members told CPJ they had not filed any legal complaint and had not been contacted by authorities after collecting his body from the morgue. They said they had no knowledge if any official investigation took place.

The university said it was also unaware of any official investigation into Kersaint’s murder. “Sadly, the security conditions in Carrefour today do not favor the pursuit of an inquiry,” said Iliophène.

Radio-Télé INUREP recently renamed its studio to honor its fallen journalist, including a plaque in his name, Iliophène told CPJ. The university, which has about 5,000 students, also plans to award an annual “Dumesky Kersaint Prize” for excellence in reporting. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Latin America and the Caribbean program staff.

After Zaw Than went to the Wa-controlled Wein Kawng in northeast Myanmar for work, his family said they lost contact. But in early October, they received a phone call claiming their son owed more than 16 million kyat (US$7,500).

The Chinese national told the family he had covered Zaw Than’s debts in late September after he allegedly lost the money gambling at a casino in Mong Pauk, just 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the border with China. 

Zaw Than’s family reported the incident to Wa state’s police department, where they said they were told he had been trafficked into a gang known for its money-laundering schemes. The police officer told the family their son had been sold to the gang for over 95 million kyat (US$14,300) by the Chinese national who had called them demanding the ransom. 

On Oct. 4, they traveled to Wein Kawng from their home in Shan state, asking police to help them find Zaw Than. The following evening, officers were able to locate him and arrange a meeting.

But when they arrived, they said their son was badly beaten and struggling to breathe. 

“He could not even breathe normally when I found him.” a family member told RFA, asking to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.. 

“He died the same day because of his injuries from the beatings. They were all over his body, and many internal injuries. This is injustice. I want justice for him.”

The family member said an autopsy confirmed their son died from his injuries. They have since complained to Wa state officials and their external relations department.

RFA contacted Lashio-based Wa liaison officer Nyi Ran seeking comment on the incident, but he had not responded by the time of publication. 

Wa state’s Mong Pauk, Pangsang, and Wein Kawng are well-known hubs for crime, including online scamming, sex trafficking, and money-laundering. Last year, 19 Myanmar nationals were sold and held against their will in one scam center in Mong Pauk after being told they would get high-paying jobs. Thai women have also reported being trafficked in the region. 

The Wa army controls portions of southern and northern Shan state and keeps close ties with China. 

Both territories are also attempting to crack down on the online crime rampant on the border. In September, Wa forces returned more than 1,300 Chinese nationals involved in online fraud.

Despite this transfer, illegal businesses are still a recurring problem, a person assisting Wa state’s labor affairs ministry told RFA, adding that many Chinese nationals start businesses under Myanmar names. 

RFA contacted the Chinese Embassy in Myanmar via email regarding gang activity and Zaw Than’s death, but the office did not immediately respond.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Kenya has offered to lead the force, which is not a UN operation, and other countries have signalled their participation.

Ahead of the Council vote, UN News’s Cristina Silveiro spoke to Ambassador Bob Rae of Canada, Chair of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Haiti.

He said the mission “is not going to be a walk in the park” and began by explaining the force’s relationship with the UN Office in Haiti, BINUH. 

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Cristina Silveiro.

Kenya has offered to lead the force, which is not a UN operation, and other countries have signalled their participation.

Ahead of the Council vote, UN News’s Cristina Silveiro spoke to Ambassador Bob Rae of Canada, Chair of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Haiti.

He said the mission “is not going to be a walk in the park” and began by explaining the force’s relationship with the UN Office in Haiti, BINUH. 

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Cristina Silveiro.

“I will surrender if you guarantee I will not be killed,” says Eugene Pakailasi, who took over leadership of Papua New Guinea’s Milne Bay gang after Tommy Maeva Baker was killed in 2021.

He proclaimed this to Milne Bay Governor Gordon Wesley who met with the gang allegedly earlier this year in a daring secret meet-and-greet event in the Owen Stanley Range in Milne Bay Province.

The gang leader revealed his reasons for maintaining the gang and requesting police leniency.

• READ MORE: Other PNG crime reports

Assistant Police Commissioner (Southern region) Clement Dalla in an interview with the PNG Post-Courier confirmed the above picture, saying that it had been taken earlier this year.

“We are aware of these pictures. The Governor has stated that Pakailasi wants to surrender,” Assistant Commissioner Dalla said.

“The Governor must reach out to police and we can work together to facilitate any surrender and work out a possible arrangement of a surrender programme.”

Police said Pakailasi was wanted for a string of robberies within the provincial capital of Alotau with his alleged involvement in various shootouts with police during Baker’s reign.

Elusive gang leader
So far, the gang leader remains elusive as police continue to make calls for the surrender of all members.

According to Governor Wesley, after being contacted by the gang to meet up, he went up to the mountains “alone” and found their camp base where they had a conversation.

“Eugene had strange reasons for keeping the gang alive, some of which involve an agreement with some prominent public figures during previous elections,” Governor Wesley said.

“Eugene said the gang’s agenda remains the same as when the former gang leader Baker was leading before his death.

“He said they were not paid for the work they did for the people in the public office and therefore still hold a grudge,” he added.

Eugene later asked the Governor to inform the police that he was not guilty of all the criminal allegations against him and that he would surrender to clear his name but was afraid of being shot dead.

“I told [the gang] that the only way I could help them was to have them surrender and work with the police in lowering the crime rate in the province,” Governor Wesley said.

Against killings in province
He reiterated that this rare occasion was followed by his efforts to have some of the gang members surrender and also said that he was against killings in the province — whether by the gang or by police.

Governor Wesley said that was the reason why he wanted to work with both the police and the gang to allow justice to be served peacefully.

The Governor claimed: “We have seen about 300 to 400 men and boys surrender their weapons in the past months since the surrender programme started.

“We have also seen about 200 deaths of young men and women who were suspected to be part of the gang in the province this year.

“I told Eugene and his gang that unless they want to be added onto the death toll, they must surrender to police.”

Governor Wesley said he would be sending an in-depth report to the provincial police commander of his conversation with the gang.

He would seek lenience from the Police Commissioner and the Prime Minister on the gang’s behalf to accommodate a peaceful surrender.

Melyne Baroi is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

CPJ has learned that at least five reporters have fled their homes in Port-au-Prince’s Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood in a wave of escalating violence as gangs clashed with police to gain control over the area.

“We are watching with grave concern as the situation in Haiti reaches new levels of bloodshed,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator, in São Paulo. “We stand in solidarity with journalists working in Haiti who are covering this horrific crescendo of violence.”

CPJ has confirmed that the violence forced the following journalists to flee their homes in recent weeks and is investigating reports that at least nine other journalists fled the Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood over the weekend.

• Arnold Junior Pierre, a reporter with the local independent broadcaster Radio Télé Galaxie, told CPJ he was forced to flee with 15 relatives on August 23 after gang members invaded his neighborhood of Savane Pistache and set fire to their home.
• Jacques Desrosiers, secretary general of the Association of Haitian Journalists, told CPJ he was forced to abandon his home on August 31 after gangs entered his neighborhood.
• Judex Vélima, camera operator for the local independent broadcaster Radio Télé Espace, told CPJ he also escaped with relatives after their home was burned on August 30.
• Kenny Raynald Petitfrere, president of the Haitian Online Media Association (CMEL), fled his home after receiving death threats, the association told CPJ.
• Celou Flécher, editor-in-chief of the independent news website Le Facteur, told CPJ he was forced to evacuate his family from their home in Carrefour Feuilles on September 1.  “People are leaving with whatever belongings they can carry and their personal documents,” he told CPJ. While his house had not been burned, “most of the houses are empty. Everyone is living in terror. No one knows when the gangs will appear,” he said.

The Carrefour Feuilles district is located in the heart of the capital and is home to many journalists. Since late July, thousands of residents have fled the area after it came under assault from the powerful Grand Ravine gang led by Renel Destina, known as “Ti Lapli.”  Police are reported to have virtually abandoned the neighborhood after they also came under attack and a police substation was burned down in Savane Pistache.

“We have lived through many dangerous moments in Haiti but nothing ever like this,” CMEL general coordinator, Dieudonné Dantor St Cyr, told CPJ on Monday. “We are exposed to violence and insecurity like the rest of the population. We live among them. We are all at the mercy of the bandits,” he added.

Since Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, the country has become one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists. CPJ has documented the killings of nine journalists since 2021, with six confirmed to have been killed in connection with their work. At least six other journalists and media workers have been kidnapped this year amid an unprecedented surge in gang violence, according to CPJ research.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

CPJ has learned that at least five reporters have fled their homes in Port-au-Prince’s Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood in a wave of escalating violence as gangs clashed with police to gain control over the area.

“We are watching with grave concern as the situation in Haiti reaches new levels of bloodshed,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator, in São Paulo. “We stand in solidarity with journalists working in Haiti who are covering this horrific crescendo of violence.”

CPJ has confirmed that the violence forced the following journalists to flee their homes in recent weeks and is investigating reports that at least nine other journalists fled the Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood over the weekend.

• Arnold Junior Pierre, a reporter with the local independent broadcaster Radio Télé Galaxie, told CPJ he was forced to flee with 15 relatives on August 23 after gang members invaded his neighborhood of Savane Pistache and set fire to their home.
• Jacques Desrosiers, secretary general of the Association of Haitian Journalists, told CPJ he was forced to abandon his home on August 31 after gangs entered his neighborhood.
• Judex Vélima, camera operator for the local independent broadcaster Radio Télé Espace, told CPJ he also escaped with relatives after their home was burned on August 30.
• Kenny Raynald Petitfrere, president of the Haitian Online Media Association (CMEL), fled his home after receiving death threats, the association told CPJ.
• Celou Flécher, editor-in-chief of the independent news website Le Facteur, told CPJ he was forced to evacuate his family from their home in Carrefour Feuilles on September 1.  “People are leaving with whatever belongings they can carry and their personal documents,” he told CPJ. While his house had not been burned, “most of the houses are empty. Everyone is living in terror. No one knows when the gangs will appear,” he said.

The Carrefour Feuilles district is located in the heart of the capital and is home to many journalists. Since late July, thousands of residents have fled the area after it came under assault from the powerful Grand Ravine gang led by Renel Destina, known as “Ti Lapli.”  Police are reported to have virtually abandoned the neighborhood after they also came under attack and a police substation was burned down in Savane Pistache.

“We have lived through many dangerous moments in Haiti but nothing ever like this,” CMEL general coordinator, Dieudonné Dantor St Cyr, told CPJ on Monday. “We are exposed to violence and insecurity like the rest of the population. We live among them. We are all at the mercy of the bandits,” he added.

Since Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, the country has become one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists. CPJ has documented the killings of nine journalists since 2021, with six confirmed to have been killed in connection with their work. At least six other journalists and media workers have been kidnapped this year amid an unprecedented surge in gang violence, according to CPJ research.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Around 6 a.m. on Sunday, July 23, about 50 heavily armed men with assault-style rifles attacked the town of Liancourt in Haiti’s Artibonite region, burning down dozens of houses and the Radio Antarctique studio, according to videos reviewed by CPJ and the station’s director and founder Roderson Elias, who spoke with CPJ in a phone interview.

During the three-hour attack on the town, at least four residents were killed, at least 10 were injured, and at least 10 abducted, according to a July 26 post on Elias’ Facebook page. It was one of the largest assaults by gang members amid the political chaos and spiraling violence against civilians since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July 2021.

According to news reports, the attack is believed to have been retaliation for a civilian killing a member of the Baz Gran Grif gang. Following the attack, the head of the Baz Gran Grif gang, Élan Luckson, said that Elias himself was “responsible,” in a voice message distributed by his followers, which CPJ reviewed. The gang leader accused Elias of turning local residents against the gang and giving away the group’s location.

“The apparently targeted attack on Haitian broadcaster Radio Antarctique is deeply troubling, and those responsible must be held accountable. Journalists should not face violent retaliation simply for doing their jobs,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator, in São Paulo. “The situation in Haiti remains untenable. Local authorities must restore order so that all citizens, including journalists, can live without fear from armed gangs.”

Elias, who wrote about the attack on social media while it was ongoing, told CPJ that gang members deliberately targeted Radio Antarctique, destroying its studio, broadcast equipment, and antenna.  

“They smashed everything and then set fire to it. It was reduced to ashes,” said Elias, who founded Radio Antarctique a year ago and broadcasts a mix of sports, music, and local news, including on gang activity in the area.

“We just had our first anniversary. Now the whole investment is gone,” he added, calculating the losses at $20,000.

The station’s 15-person staff was unharmed in the attack. Elias’ home, located next to the station, was also burned and his car badly damaged, he said. Elias told CPJ that he had been threatened by Baz Gran Grif members in February and forced to leave town before returning when he felt it was safe again.

“The toll of atrocities by Élan Luckson’s men is truly sad. The main private businesses have been completely looted. The premises of the Liancourt sub-commissariat and those of Radio Antarctique are completely burnt down, as well as several family homes,” the deputy head of the Saint-Marc district, Walter Montas, told Le Nouvelliste, Haiti’s largest newspaper.

“The police were nowhere to be seen. They never responded. We are on our own, helpless against the gangs,” Elias told CPJ from an undisclosed location, after fleeing the town during the attack.

He said he would like to leave the country for a while, but said getting a visa was difficult for Haitians, adding, “one day I would like to return, but right now we can’t count on our local authorities to protect us.”

A regional government representative, Venson François, confirmed the attack to Le Nouvelliste and lamented “the complexity of the law enforcement response to such repeated tragedies.”

The absence of Haitian law enforcement has become typical of the country’s state of insecurity over the last two years, according to news reports, prompting the United Nations and human rights groups to call for foreign intervention to protect civilians caught up in the violence.

In a report, the National Human Rights Defense Network nongovernmental organization expressed concern over the inaction of state authorities, citing an upsurge in acts of violence, with at least 75 people killed and 40 kidnapped between May 1 and July 12.

When asked if he was aware of the alleged police absence in Liancourt, national police spokesperson Gary Desrosiers told CPJ via messaging app that he was “aware of the situation” but did not elaborate further.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

During the Mao era, senior officials who fell out of favor and later purged were frequently excised from the annals of party missives – and party history.

The same fate appears to have befallen Qin Gang, leaving the world to scratch its head and wonder why China, as opaque as ever, is not telling.

At the very least the erasures undermine the official explanation in weeks past that Qin’s absence was due to ill health.

Almost as soon as foreign policy chief Wang Yi was announced to be taking over Qin’s position – in a move many China watchers consider to be transitional – Qin, who had been catapulted into the role of foreign minister as a Xi Jinping favorite and had only served for seven months – was scrubbed from the foreign ministry’s web pages.

Even foreign ministry news releases have been removed – replaced with a message that reads, “The page you are visiting does not exist or has been deleted.”

The page for the foreign minister on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website continues to be blank, in what Han Yang, who formerly worked for China’s foreign ministry and is now a political commentator in Australia, said on X (formerly Twitter) is “possibly because Wang Yi has yet to be sworn in.”

All references to Qin and his activities as foreign minister have been removed from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, but he continues to be listed elsewhere as a state councilor and references to his tenure as ambassador to the U.S. continue to exist.

Some analysts think that this is a sign that he still has some measure of protection; others say it’s likely Qin is being purged but the process is incomplete, and he may forfeit his state councilor role in future too.

Qin is also still listed as a member of the Communist Party’s elite Central Committee. 

But Yang noted, “Let me remind everyone that in Bo Xilai’s case [President Xi Jinping’s high-flying, populist rival who fell from grace after his wife poisoned a British businessman], he was initially removed from Chongqing party post in exactly the same manner, a short statement without giving reasons, while maintaining his Politburo position. 4 weeks later the announcement came for his investigation.”

“People from the outside are totally in the dark and the episode illustrates that Chinese politics is becoming increasingly unpredictable and volatile, though under a calm surface,” Ho-fung Hung, an expert in Chinese politics at Johns Hopkins University, told AFP.

Meanwhile, in related news, and a reminder of the risks of China’s high-wire politics, the former Communist Party chief of Hangzhou – home to Jack Ma’s Alibaba – was given life behind bars in the form of a deferred death sentence for corruption.

Zhou Jiangyong was convicted of accepting CNY182 million (U.S.$25 million) in bribes and has been deprived of his political rights and had all of his assets confiscated.

One winner

Amid a week of political hijinks and skullduggery, one political player has made his way to the top as anticipated.

Pan Gongsheng, a Chinese Communist Party technocrat experienced in commercial banking and financial regulation, was appointed the governor of the People’s Bank of China. Pan holds a PhD in economics from China and received some training from Cambridge University and Harvard University.

The position of governor of the central bank is an important one in China’s financial system, but the governor’s powers are curtailed by the party compared to central bankers elsewhere. President Xi himself demands a role in all key economic decisions, for example.

Pan managed the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves for seven years – as Administrator of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, managing China’s foreign reserves of around U.S.$3.2 trillion.

He’s also credited with arresting a slide in the value of the yuan in 2016.

He replaces Yi Gang, who had been PBOC governor since 2018, after replacing Zhou Xiaochuan, the PBOC’s longest serving governor, having served in the role for 15 years.

Pan has a PhD in economics from China’s Renmin University, was a visiting scholar at Cambridge and also studied at Harvard.

He was anticipated to be made governor ahead of Tuesday’s announcement and he will have his work cut out for him.

The value of China’s currency has been sliding this year as the economy faces unprecedented headwinds in the form of youth unemployment and lackluster consumer and private sector confidence, leading to obvious concern emanating from Beijing that what is now a malaise could become something worse.  

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Chris Taylor for RFA.

Asked about a report in London's Times newspaper mentioning widespread rumors that Qin is currently under investigation for having an affair with Phoenix TV reporter Fu Xiaotian, foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said: "I have no information to provide."

Qin has been notably absent from high-profile diplomatic meetings since he met with the foreign ministers of Sri Lanka and Vietnam, and with the Russian deputy foreign minister in Beijing on June 25.

"I suggest you check the website of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs," Mao told a regular news briefing in Beijing on Monday.

His most recent mention on the foreign ministry website was during Mao's June 26 briefing, in which she gave a brief account of his meeting with the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Roman Rudenko.

Mao said China's diplomatic activities were "proceeding normally."

However, her answers were omitted from official records of the briefing that were later published to the foreign ministry's website. 

A full version of the press conference live-streamed by a Taiwanese TV station can be found on YouTube.

Media speculation that Qin had been sacked grew when his photo and profile link were not found on the page of “major officials” on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website.

But this is misleading because the minister’s photo and profile doesn’t normally appear there, even in the past. Instead, the ministry has a special page dedicated to the minister, with details of his recent remarks and activities, and Qin Gang still appears there.

Former US ambassador

Before becoming foreign minister, Qin was China’s ambassador to the United States and known as a a "wolf warrior" – combative Chinese diplomats who are quick to denounce perceived criticism of China.

A close ally of party leader Xi Jinping, he stepped down in January after being promoted by Xi – which makes the questions being openly asked about him extremely politically sensitive.

Qin was the first ambassador to Washington to be directly promoted to foreign minister in 20 years, as well as the first to be appointed outside of a National People's Congress annual session. His predecessors Li Zhaoxing and Yang Jiechi both served as vice ministers of foreign affairs before being promoted.

When Qin was ambassador, Fu interviewed him for Phoenix TV in Washington on March 24, 2022, as part of the channel’s “Talk With World Leaders” series, asking him about a video call a few days earlier between Xi and U.S. President Joe Biden and China’s position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Qin’s continued absence from the public eye comes after foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on July 11 that Qin wouldn't be attending forthcoming meetings of ASEAN foreign ministers "for physical reasons."

Wang Yi, who heads the ruling Chinese Communist Party Central Committee's foreign affairs office attended those meetings in Qin's stead.

Qin's scheduled meetings with EU diplomats in late June were also canceled.

The pro-China Sing Tao Daily newspaper cited "reports" in a July 10 story suggesting that Qin had disappeared from public view because he had been infected with COVID-19, citing Wang Wenbin's "failure to deny" such reports when asked by journalists about Qin's whereabouts on July 7.

The Times reported that Qin's disappearance from the public eye came amid "speculation that he has fallen foul of the leadership and even rumors of an affair with a well-known television presenter," citing local media reports that Fu and her baby son had also recently disappeared from public view.

”The rumors are that he's sick, but we're all just reading tea leaves here because nobody really knows the truth," YouTuber Jiang Taigong commented in a July 15 video. "We've only had vague comments from the Chinese Communist Party, so the guesses are coming thick and fast."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kai Di for RFA Mandarin, Man Siu Ping for RFA Cantonese.

During the economic crisis in 2008, the United States sought China’s aid. US treasury secretary Hank Paulson conferred with Chinese officials, and China agreed to increase the value of the RMB and to stop selling US T-bills which it had been doing at that time.

Paulson said, “It is clear that China accepts its responsibility as a major world economy that will work with the United States and other partners to ensure global economic stability.” But the notion that China was acting in a selfless fashion was also dispelled by Paulson who stated China helps when it is in their own interest.

Paulson depicted the US position during the crisis as “dealing with Chinese from a position of strength…”

That same attitude was repeated by the US State Department in March 2021 during the first face-to-face meeting with president Joe Biden’s administration in Anchorage, Alaska: “America’s approach will be undergirded by confidence in our dealing with Beijing — which we are doing from a position of strength — even as we have the humility to know that we are a country eternally striving to become a more perfect union.” [emphasis added]

Given the baleful US shenanigans against China, Chinese high-ranking officials were ill-disposed to meet with their American counterparts. Chairman Xi Jinping was not interested in meeting with Biden after the US shot down a Chinese weather balloon. The Pentagon sought a meeting between defense secretary Lloyd Austin and China’s minister of national defense Li Shangfu, but the latter reportedly ghosted Austin in Singapore.

Finally, secretary of state Antony Blinken managed to secure a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang in Beijing. The official readouts for each country, however, reveal a glaring gap between them.

The Chinese readout noted that “China-U.S. relations are at their lowest point since the establishment of diplomatic ties…” Other excerpts read:

China has always maintained continuity and stability in its policies towards the United States, fundamentally adhering to the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation proposed by President Xi Jinping. These principles should also be the shared spirit, bottom line, and goal that both sides uphold together.

Qin Gang pointed out that the Taiwan question is at the core of China’s core interests, it is the most significant issue in China-U.S. relations, and it is also the most prominent risk. China urges the U.S. side to adhere to the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. Joint Communiqués, and truly implement its commitment not to support “Taiwan independence”.

That the US and China were not on the same page was clear from the oft-heard banality in the American readout:

The Secretary made clear that the United States will always stand up for the interests and values of the American people and work with its allies and partners to advance our vision for a world that is free, open, and upholds the international rules-based order.

That the US side made no comment on China’s core interest was a glaring brush off. Instead the US side pushed its “international rules-based order,” which is about rules defined by the US for others to follow. In other words, China does not decide what rules apply to its province of Taiwan.

The readouts made crystal clear that China and the US view the world through different lenses.

China is about peaceful development and win-win trade relations. The US is about waging war, sanctions, bans on trading, and an immodest belief in its indispensability. Because of this, China and Russia with the Global South are each forging their own way, a way that respects each country’s sovereignty. In future, it will be increasingly difficult for the US to use loans to impoverish other nations and plunder their wealth through the IMF’s financial strictures. Sanctions, freezing assets, and blocking financial transactions through the SWIFT system have pushed countries away and toward de-dollarization, joining BRICS, taking part in the Belt and Road Initiative, and using other financial institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank based in Beijing. Even companies in countries nominally aligned with the US are pulling back from the harms of adhering to US trading bans. The US pressure tactics have resulted in blowback, and there is sure to be growing apprehension within empire.

The US is a warmaker. It flattened Iraq, Libya, and would have done the same to Syria had not Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah intervened at the invitation of the Syrian government. Nevertheless, the US still illegally occupies an enormous chunk of Syria and plunders its oil, revealing its true nature to the world.

China is a peacemaker; for example, the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, the Syrian-Arab League reunion, a ceasefire between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, a proposal for peace between Russia and Ukraine that was rejected by the US, and currently China is playing an honest broker to try and solve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, something the US has failed miserably at solving (not that it was ever interested in solving this besides, perhaps, a brief interregnum under Jimmy Carter).

China has stood steadfastly with Russia during its special military operation in Donbass and Ukraine. China knows that if the US-NATO would succeed in their proxy war, the plan is “regime change” and a carve up of Russia to exploit its resource wealth. This would pave the way for further “regime change” in China.

The Blinken-Qin meeting has been an abysmal failure in diplomacy. Communist China is ascendant, and the capitalist US is in economic decline, but it still believes that it can bully and fight its way to the top by keeping the others down.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

The post The Gang That Couldn’t Snoop Straight appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Kendall Hawkins.

“At the end of 2016, students in my classroom started to ask, ‘Teacher, why are my parents being taken? Why was my uncle taken?’” Sidik said in translated testimony to the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party during a Thursday night hearing.

“I was unable to answer, as it was very painful,” she said. “I would tell them, ‘You know what, your parents had to learn the national language – that’s why they were taken.’ But the kids weren’t satisfied by that.” 

Her students were too smart.

“They said if they had to learn the language, why would they not learn the language at the school we are at right now?” she recounted.

The truth, as Sidik already knew but would later experience first-hand, was that adult members of the majority-Muslim ethnic minority in far-western China were being taken to concentration camps to be tortured, raped, subjected to psychological warfare and sterilized.

Their only crime: practicing a religion and possessing a cultural identity that did not place the Chinese Communist Party in the ultimate position of authority. 

The apparent goal of the internment was to break down that identity, and bring the population of about 12 million Uyghurs to heel.

Then the children’s camps started to open.

“The name,” Sidik told Congress on Thursday, “was ‘kindergarten’ or ‘boarding school,’ but, in reality, it was camps for the children.” 

Tiger chairs

Eventually, Sidik herself was taken away and forced to teach Mandarin in the compounds, which she described during her testimony as hulking high-security prisons that would have cost millions to build.

Another former camp prisoner, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, the author of “How I Survived a Chinese ‘Re-Education’ Camp,” told the committee hearing she only managed to escape thanks to a long-running diplomatic effort by the French government, pressured by her daughter in France.

There she witnessed her fellow Uyghurs with shaved heads in jump suits with numbers clearly printed on the front. The prisoners were regularly kept shackled at their legs, severely beaten for minor infractions and only allowed to be referred to by their number.

The daily 11-hour study lessons included Chinese history and law and patriotic songs. For some prisoners, lessons would be immediately followed by a trip to an interrogation room in the room next door.

“Each time they interrogated us, they put black hoods on our heads and they shackled our feet, and they handcuffed us,” Haitiwaji said, before locking them into a contraption known as a “tiger chair,” a constrictive metal seat that does not allow its victim to move.

If prisoners were ever caught speaking Uyghur, they were locked in a tiger chair for up to 72 hours, she added, “and they kept us until we said we were never again going to speak in the Uyghur language.”

Gang rape and sterilization

Sidik said the experience was clearly intended to dehumanize.

She told the hearing that before eating – usually a single Chinese “bao” bun each day – the Uyghur prisoners were also forced to praise the Chinese motherland, the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping, replacing the customary Islamic grace before a meal.

But it was through torture that the most damage was done.

Sidik said there were four types of torture used by the Chinese prison guards – “electric baton, electric helmet, electric glove and the tiger chair” – and that after a prisoner was called for an interrogation, “those prisoners were unable to come to class for weeks or months.”

“The interrogation rooms are located just next to the classrooms,” she said. “So 30 minutes after the prisoners were taken, you would hear horrible screaming sounds because they were being tortured.”

The torture also included extreme sexual violence. 

“The horrible thing is when these female prisoners were taken for interrogation, they faced gang rape by the guards,” Sidik recounted in tears. “And the worst thing is they – the guards or police – use electric batons to insert their private parts to rape and torture them.”

A teenage girl imprisoned alongside Sidik bled from her genitals for two months, she said, before she watched her pass away.

She also said she was imprisoned alongside what she estimated was 10,000 other women, mostly between the ages of 17 and 40, who she said were injected with an unknown “medicine” every Monday. 

“After they took that medicine, their period would stop,” she said. “Even some women who were breastfeeding, the breast milk will stop.”

In May 2019, she said, she was herself sterilized in an operation.

At least 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities are believed to have been held in a network of detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017.

Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers. The government has denied widespread allegations that it has tortured people in the camps or mistreated other Muslims living in Xinjiang.

Sidik said she eventually escaped the terror thanks to her daughter who lived in the Netherlands. But she said she was left scarred by the experience and still feared for her husband, whom she was forced to divorce by Chinese authorities and had since lost contact with.

Once she left China, she said, a Chinese policeman video-called her from her husband’s phone and tried to convince her to “come work” for the government. 

She held up a screengrab of the man grinning.

Expert testimony

Thursday night’s hearing represented the second sitting of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which was set up by the new Republican-led majority in the House of Representatives and aims to build a bipartisan consensus on “the threat posed by” Beijing.

After the testimony of the former prisoners, three experts on the Uyghur genocide also gave testimony, with Adrian Zenz, a German anthropologist and director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, telling the committee that the genocide was driven by a “paranoia” among China’s leaders.

He said Beijing’s fears about Uyghurs in the far-west resisting their rule was due to “an exaggerated threat perception that genocide scholars have linked to all major atrocities in the past 100 years.”

“These witness statements we've heard do not speak of isolated incidents. They reflect a systematic policy. Classified documents outlined Beijing's secret plan to subjugate the region,” Zenz said, noting that Xi had asked former Tibet party chief Chen Quanguo “experienced with crushing dissent in Tibet” to move to Xinjiang.

Zenz said an estimated 2 million Uyghurs were detained in the five years from 2017, when the program of official “mass internments” began in earnest, with Chen implementing “measures to prevent births, leading to unprecedented declines in Uyghur birth rates.”

“The presumed goal of these measures, and the intent behind them, was to optimize the ethnic population structure, diluting Uyghur populations with Han,” Zenz said, “because concentrated Uyghur populations were considered a national security threat.”

Lawmakers from both parties asked what tangible steps the U.S. government could take to help end the Uyghur genocide.

Nury Turkel, a Uyghur-American who chairs the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, said U.S. officials needed to investigate mutual fund providers like Vanguard, BlackRock, HSBC and Fidelity, which he accused of investing in the repression.

He said China’s repression of the Uyghurs – and the associated forced labor – had become a big business, and had taken on a life of its own given the large sums of money Beijing was throwing at it.

“They invested zillions of dollars, and now this has become a political economy. This is why they've been aggressively exporting their digital surveillance,” he said. “We're talking about more than 80 countries around the world, and that includes some democratic nations.”

‘Never Again’

Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said his great grandparents escaped Jewish pogroms in Poland and Soviet Ukraine, and praised Radio Free Asia for its role in informing the world about the Uyghurs, which he likened to Radio Free Europe’s role in a past era.

“Radio Free Asia, also developed and funded by the United States Agency for Global Media, is providing these services of independent journalism in the Indo-Pacific region,” Auchincloss said. “They were the first media outlet to publish reporting about the CCP’s internment, forced separation, slave labor and sterilization of the Uyghur people.”

Naomi Kikoler, director of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, replied that it was important for RFA to continue broadcasting such stories, because Beijing “wants you to think that there is no evidence” of a genocide.

“The role of Radio Free Asia has been incredibly important, and the role of the independent press is essential to telling the story of the Uyghur people,” Kikoler said. “Many of the journalists themselves are Uyghur, and they're telling the stories of their own communities.” 

“I can't even imagine the weight that sits on their shoulders as they do that – at great risk to their own personal families,” she added. “Often they’re able to do so in the Uyghur language, which the Chinese government is intent on also trying to erase and eliminate.”

Kikoler appealed for people to take action and do for the Uyghurs “what was not done for the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.”

“This is our ‘Never again’ moment,” she said. “The words ‘Never again’ were meant to be a lasting commitment, no matter how challenging, including when a superpower like China is perpetrating the crimes.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns for RFA.

The post War Over Taiwan: Australia’s Gang of Five appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The latest example of this came in articles run in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of Melbourne. The premise is already clear from the columnists, Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott. Australia faces a “Red Alert”, and, to that end, needs a warring fan club. Not since the domino theory bewitched strategists and confused military planners have Australians witnessed this: a series of articles featuring a gang of five with one purpose: to render the Australian public so witless as to reject any peaceful accommodation.

First, the provocative colouring for the article, “How a conflict over Taiwan could swiftly reach our shores.” The Australian continent is shown bathed in a sea of red. Various military bases and facilities are outlined. For good measure, there is a picture of Australian soldiers firing an artillery piece in “military exercises in 2018 at Shoalwater Bay, Queensland.”

Then, the blistering opening lines of terror. “Within 72 hours of a conflict breaking out over Taiwan, Chinese missile bombardments and devastating cyberattacks on Australia would begin. For the first time since World War II, the mainland would be under attack.” The authors already anticipate a good complement of US troops to occupy the Australian north, some 150,000 “seeking refuge from the immediate conflict zone.”

The Red Alert panellists, anointed as “defence experts”, brim with such scenarios. All, as they state in a joint communique, agree on one thing: “Australia has many vulnerabilities. It has long and exposed connections to the rest of the world – sea, air and undersea – yet is incapable of protecting them.”

Leading the gang of five is Peter Jennings, who has had an unshakeable red-under-the-bed fantasy for years. A former deputy secretary for strategy in the Australian Defence Department, and steering the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) for a decade (that’s Canberra’s revolving door for you), Jennings is adamant and steely. “As I think of a conflict over Taiwan, what I’m thinking about is something that very quickly grows in scale and location.”

There is no reason at all why such a growth in scale or location should happen, but this is not the purpose of the exercise. The point of the Red Alert fantasy is to neutralise the significance of Australia’s natural boundaries – some of the most formidable on the planet – and dismiss them in any conflict with Beijing. “Distance is no longer equivalent to safety from our strategic perspective,” ponders Jennings.

Jennings inadvertently reveals the case against war, which can only be an encouragement to activists and officials keen to reverse the trend of turning Australia into a US imperial outpost of naval and military bases that would be used in any Taiwan conflict. “If China wants to seriously go after Taiwan in any military sense, the only way they can really contemplate quick success is to pre-emptively attack those assets that might be a threat to them. That means Pine Gap goes.” Pine Gap remains that misnamed joint US-Australian signals facility that has facilitated illegal drone strikes in foreign territories most Australian politicians would fail to find on a map.

Oddly enough, the columnists then suggest that Jennings is breaking the “powerful unwritten rule in Australia” which involves not mentioning war. This is fabulous nonsense, given the trumpeting and screeching for conflict that has come from ASPI for some years now.

Lavina Lee, another Red Alert panellist, is also into the business of softening the Australian public for war, or at least “the possibility that we might go to war, and what would happen either way. We should talk about what we would look like if we win and what it would look like if we lose.” And what about peace, a word finding its way into Canberra’s garbage tip of taboo words?

Australia’s former chief scientist, Alan Finkel, dolls out his own catastrophic scenario. “Airlines in particular can be taken down very, very easily.” He goes on to suggest that the challenges to electricity will be more resistant, as “most of our generators are not that sophisticated in terms of cyber. They will be [more sophisticated] five to 10 years from now. Things like the telephone network and airlines are very obvious targets.”

Retired army major-general Mick Ryan makes his contribution by wishing Australia to be readied for war. In a message common to most military officers, the civilians should really do more about giving his brethren more cash. “Like most other Western militaries, we believe in the cult of the offensive, so we have underinvested in defensive capabilities.” He also fears that any war over Taiwan would “involve strikes on US bases, on fuel and munition holdings, ships across the region, including our own country potentially”.

Lesley Seebeck, former head of the Australian National University’s Cyber Institute, completes the crew of five, and laments the “state of our critical infrastructure” that has just been left to lie. “There is no sense of investing for the future.” Perversely enough, Seebeck’s view reads amusingly when considered alongside Finkel, who points out that more sophisticated cyber-infrastructure in the future, rather than clunkier systems with greater redundancies, would actually make Australia more vulnerable. Sometimes, it pays to keep the old.

A few things are worth noting in this frothy mix of fantabulation and establishment fire breathing. In the quest to gather such a panel, no effort has been made to consult the expertise of a China hand. That lobby, able to provide a more nuanced, less heavy-footed approach, is being shunned, their advice exorcised in any effort to encourage war.

Bizarrely, the panellists offer an increasingly popular non-sequitur that has creeped into the warmonger’s manual: Would Australia’s leaders, in war, pass the Zelensky test? This somehow implies that the Ukraine conflict offers salient lessons over a war over Taiwan, an absurd comparison that muddled strategists are fond of making.

Most of all, Beijing’s own actual intentions over Taiwan are to be avoided. The presumption in ASPI-land is that a war is imminent, and that Beijing would want to go to war over the island as a matter of course. China’s President Xi Jinping’s main advisor on the subject, veteran ideologue Wang Huning, suggests an approach at odds with such thinking.

The Red Alert exercise has drawn necessary and important criticism. Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating did not mince his words in a fuming column for Pearls and Irritations. “Today’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age front page stories on Australia’s supposed war risk with China represents the most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over fifty years of active public life.” One might even go further back than that. The war times are coming, and as are those gangs seeking to encourage them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

As some of us pointed out at the time, the heart of the austerity gang’s scare stories was not actually Social Security or the aging of the population, but rather projections of rapid growth in per person health care costs continuing for many decades into the future. This rapid growth was projected for both public and private sector costs.

If health care costs actually followed the projected growth path, it would devastate the economy, regardless of whether we paid for it through public programs like Medicare and Medicaid, or through private health care insurance and out-of-pocket spending. (Per person spending in public programs was actually rising less rapidly in the public sector programs than in the private sector.) The real issue had nothing to do with the government budget, it was fixing the health care system.

Anyhow, there actually is a good story here that has gotten far less attention than it deserves. Health care spending has not grown anywhere near as fast as had been projected. I previously did a piece showing that health care spending has actually fallen as a share of GDP since the pandemic. I decided to go back to 2000 and show the picture over the longer term.[1]

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis and author’s calculations.

As can be seen, the share of GDP devoted to health care did rise sharply in the first three years of the century, rising from 13.6 percent at the start of the century to almost 16.0 percent by 2003. It then leveled off until the start of the Great Recession, when it jumped again, hitting 17.5 percent of GDP in 2009. It then leveled off again for several years, following the introduction of Obamacare, before edging up to 18.6 percent in 2016. Since then it was little changed, until it dipped sharply following the pandemic. In the most recent quarter it was just 17.6 percent of GDP, roughly the same share as we saw in 2009.

That was hugely better than was projected back in the Peter Peterson scare stories day. In fact, it was even hugely better than what the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was predicting back in 2009. CBO’s long-term budget projections from 2009 showed that health care spending would be equal to 33.1 percent of total consumption spending by 2022 (Table F2-2). In fact, my calculations (adjusted for the 0.8 percentage point gap with CMS), show health care spending at just 24.8 percent of current consumption spending.

The gap between the 33.1 percent of consumption projection from CBO and 24.8 percent actual, is equal to more than $1.45 trillion on annual basis. This comes to $11,800 per family each year. Compared to projected path of growth of health care spending from 13 years ago, an average family has an additional $11,800 a year to spend on items other than health care.

This is a huge deal. After all the media have been telling us that families were devastated by inflation that outstripped wage growth by less than 1 percent since the start of the pandemic. Imagine how they would feel if they were paying another $11,800 a year for health care insurance or out-of-pocket spending.

We can debate why health care spending growth slowed so sharply. The Affordable Care Act almost certainly played an important role. The post-pandemic slowdown may reflect a switch to more telemedicine and at home diagnostic tests. (The use of therapeutic equipment has soared in recent years.)

This slower growth may reflect a deterioration in the quality of care. If so, we should see this in health outcome measures over time. We also should not be deceived in thinking that our health care system is now highly efficient. We still spend far more per person than every other wealthy country and more than twice as much as countries like Canada and France.

But, we have dodged the health care horror story that was projected in the 1990s by the Peter Peterson gang and more recently by CBO. And, that is very good news.

Notes.

[1] These numbers are slightly higher than what the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS) report for health care spending as a share of GDP. They showed a figure of 17.6 percent for 2019 (the last year for which data are available), while my calculations come to 18.4 percent. I assume this is due to some double counting, where I may have some government health care spending, which also shows up as consumption. For those wanting to check, I added lines 64, 119, 170, and 273 from NIPA Table 2.4.5U and line 32 from NIPA Table 3.12U. These are therapeutic equipment, pharmaceuticals and other medical products, health care services, and net health care insurance. Line 32 is the government spending on Medicaid and other health care provision. Although the level is somewhat higher than the CMS data indicate presumably the changes over this period follow the changes as measured by CMS reasonably closely.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog. 

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

A recent revival of local prime-time TV documentaries has highlighted some thorny social issues and raised awkward questions about justice and equality.

Among them was a revealing investigation this week showing the cost of white-collar crime dwarfs that of welfare fraud, but draws lighter punishments and gets a lot less scrutiny in the media than the kind of crimes that play out in public.

For years, the heyday of New Zealand TV documentary and current affairs seemed to be in the past.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: ‘Uncovering injustice and inequities’

Gone are the days of Mike McRoberts’ mellifluous voice introducing local investigative stories on 60 Minutes after a few seconds of distinctive clock-ticking. The popular franchise stopped producing local content some years ago.

20/20, while still on air, mainly releases repackaged content from the US these days and in spite of the continuing long-form journalism of TVNZ’s Sunday, documentaries have been fading from New Zealand screens for some time.

Lately though, TVNZ has revived the strand Documentary New Zealand with a series of eight new NZ On Air-funded films for TVNZ1 on Tuesday nights between Eat Well For Less and Coronation Street, and on the on-demand service TVNZ+.

Among the most engaging and often moving ones was No Māori Allowed, which aired last week.

Pukekohe discrimination
The documentary delves into the history of Pukekohe, where for decades Māori were subject to discrimination and sometimes, violence.

It deftly navigates several tensions — first between local Pākehā and Māori who lived though an era of segregated movie theatres, but also between the people trying to bring the area’s past to light and the kuia and kaumatua who lived through it, and still bear the scars.

While No Māori Allowed highlighted historic racism and the legacy it has left, this week’s documentary Crime: Need vs Greed trains its eye on a more modern form of racial and economic injustice.

Host Tim McKinnel argues we’ve “sleepwalked” into a $5 billion white collar crime wave of costly fraud and deception offences while the attention of our justice system and media is turned toward often low level street crime.

“While society and the media fixate on gang crimes, ram raids, and other forms of street crime, white collar criminals have been robbing us blind. We’ve sleepwalked into a $5 billion crime wave that no-one wants to talk about. Instead we’re tough on crime and spend billions locking up the poor,” he says in Need vs Greed.

Not only have white collar criminals been robbing us blind — the documentary presents evidence they’ve been getting away with it.

Tax law specialist Lisa Marriot delivers some staggering statistics on the double standard. Her research found people convicted of tax fraud crimes averaging $287,000 have a 22 percent chance of receiving a prison sentence — while those convicted of welfare fraud worth an average of $67,000 are imprisoned 60 percent of the time.

The lack of consequences for white collar crime belies its scale and impact.

$1.7 billion fraud prosecution
A 2014 investigation by New Zealand Herald journalist Matt Nippert helped trigger a $1.7 billion fraud prosecution against the company South Canterbury Finance.

In Crime: Need vs Greed, he says it’s “more than every Treaty settlement combined in New Zealand’s history” or “a hundred years of benefit fraud in one go”.

Given the relative figures involved, it’s worth asking why benefit fraud or street crime like ram raids get so much more attention.

Nippert says part of the reason is obvious: street crime is visceral and a lot more understandable to audiences.

“It’s the comparison between a Jerry Bruckheimer action flick and something much more slow and sedate like a documentary spread across, say, six episodes.

“I think ram raids are quite a violent, shocking act and should be covered. But they are also effectively a pre-scripted sort of action heist movie — with car crashes and getaways and splitting the loot — all condensed down to this one moment of action.

“But the white collar financial crimes often occur very subtly, very carefully, very deceptively over years, sometimes decades,” he says.

Fraud story legal threats
Fraud stories also pose legal difficulties, partly because the perpetrators can afford to hire lawyers and threaten defamation action.

Nippert is routinely threatened with legal action over his investigations. The Herald‘s lawyers have to check almost everything that he writes.

Meanwhile, street crime is more likely to come before the courts, and reporting on it is less likely to be subject to suppression orders and legal challenges from defendants.

“A lot of reporting comes from courts are a reflection of wider problem,” Nippert says.

“You will tend to get far more disadvantaged people in the District Court facing charges. On the other side of it, when you’re looking at sort of white collar crimes . . . I’ve run into suppression orders many, many times. So that not only maybe dampens down the reporting, but also slows it down enormously.”

Journalists have been highlighting inequities in the court system recently, with NZME running the Open Justice project and RNZ’s Is This Justice, which revealed — among other things — that Pākehā are discharged without conviction and granted name suppression at higher rates than Māori, that 90 percent of High Court and Court of Appeal judges are Pākehā, and that judges could be presiding over the cases of people they know.

Human brain ‘and zeros’
Another issue contributing to the comparative dearth of fraud reporting is that the “human brain does funny things when it sees zeroes,” Nippert says.

“The difference between $10 million and $100 million becomes quite ethereal. But everyone can understand what $1000 in the hand looks like.”

Despite the inherent disadvantages fraud stories have in a click-based media economy, Nippert says more reporters should cover them because of the huge costs these crimes impose on victims and society.

That might mean doing a basic accountancy paper at university or downloading Google Sheets onto their phone, but the barriers to entry aren’t as high as some reporters might think, he says.

“I used to think I didn’t have that sort of brain [for numbers]. But then I was made redundant and the only job I could get was a business reporter in the NBR and you know, if you give it a go, I think you’ll find it’s a lot more straightforward than you’ve conditioned yourself to fear,” he says.

“It’s important to point out for readers that some of these cases are alarming and we should be paying close attention because that $100 million isn’t just $100 million from some insurance company — that’s likely to be a thousand families who have lost their nest egg, and whose financial future is extraordinarily precarious, probably for the rest of their lives.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The amendments, the final version of which was published on Wednesday, describe Xi Jinping’s thought as "the essence of Chinese culture and the spirit of the times" and endorsing Xi's ideology and tasking the party's 90 million members with "safeguarding" his position as "core" leader.

Former Communist Party school professor Cai Xia said the amendments effectively turn the party into Xi's personal "gang," as its members are obliged to uphold his leadership.

"This concept of the 'two safeguards' actually reduces the party to a gang," Cai told RFA. "Why? Because political parties are about coming together and cooperating to achieve common political goals. The relationship between members is one of comradeship and equality," she said. 

"But now that he has enshrined [these amendments] in the party constitution,... it's no longer a political party when you have 90 million people in the party all revolving around a single person," she said.

"The Communist Party has become a gang organization with him as its gang boss," said Cai, who now lives in the United States.

Xi began a third term in office on Sunday, packing the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee with his close political allies, in a consolidation of personal power not seen in Beijing since the personality cult surrounding Mao Zedong, political commentators told RFA.

The Central Committee reselected Xi as general secretary, breaking with decades of political precedent by granting him a third term after his predecessors were limited to two, prompting speculation that he may now stay in post indefinitely given the lack of an obvious successor.

Baked in

Political analyst Chen Daoyin said the constitutional changes bake in Xi Jinping's absolute leadership through the party machine.

"We hadn't yet seen [this insistence on] the absolute leadership of the party over the armed forces ... which is effectively putting the gun ... in Xi Jinping's hands," Chen said.

"They also emphasize that, in the organizational line of the 'new era,’ that the evaluation and appointment of party officials is also in his hands," he said. "It turns maintaining [Xi's leadership] into an obligation for every member of the party."

"This means absolute power for Xi Jinping ... because of that binding power on party members and officials,” Chen said.

Ming Chu-cheng, honorary politics professor at National Taiwan University, said the "two safeguards" refers to "resolutely safeguarding general secretary Xi Jinping's position at the core of the party."

Xi's smooth transition to an unprecedented third term in office was marked by rare public protest, including against his zero-COVID policy, both at home and overseas.

On the eve of the congress, a lone protester dubbed “Bridge Man” unfurled a banner with anti-Xi slogans on a highway overpass before quickly getting carried off by police. Chinese authorities were quick to shut down social media accounts circulating images of the banner, but photos and videos of the incident got wide attention among Chinese living overseas.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Mandarin.

Protests are growing in Port-au-Prince as thousands fill the streets to demand the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ariel Henry resign after he announced he would raise fuel prices amid an already dire humanitarian crisis. Countries including the U.S. and Canada have sent military equipment to assist the Haitian police in cracking down on the unrest, and the U.S. has been pushing the United Nations Security Council to authorize a security mission, spurring more protests against foreign intervention. “We are seeing people really protesting on the street for the right to [a] sovereign solution to the issues that are happening, and they are saying 'no' to an armed invasion from the international community,” says Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection is set to hold its first fall public hearing, we look at one of the key groups that helped plan and carry out the attack as part of their goal to normalize political violence, with HuffPost journalist Andy Campbell, author of the new book, “We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered In a New Era of America.” He says, “They’ve been on a parade of violence at the behest of Trump and the GOP for six years now.” Campbell recently obtained a document that gives rare insight into how the Proud Boys “meticulously” plan their rallies and how they were going to carry out a march in New York City on January 10. He says GOP rhetoric, parroted by the right-wing media, is normalizing the political violence committed by the Proud Boys and, in effect, “sanitizing them for the rest of the country.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Progressive campaigners on Wednesday responded with frustration to reporting that Congressman Josh Gottheimer may rally right-wing House Democrats to thwart a potential reconciliation package party leaders are working out with Sen. Joe Manchin.

"Gottheimer is just being a saboteur, totally captured by his financial sector donors."

As Indivisible co-executive director Leah Greenberg put it: "Gottheimer really is gleefully committing arson all on his own right now."

Axios reports that Gottheimer (D-N.J.) "is gauging support among House centrists for a counteroffer to the emerging Senate reconciliation package, with one big clause: No new taxes."

Specifically, the outlet details that his counteroffer envisions $520 billion in new spending related to health and climate, and $627 billion generated from improved Internal Revenue Service enforcement and drug pricing reform.

"Gottheimer's discussions target a small group that includes Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux (D-Ga.), Ed Case (D-Hawaii), Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), Susie Lee (D-Nev.) Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), and Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.)," according to Axios.

While Manchin (D-W.Va.) played a key role in killing the Build Back Better bill that House Democrats passed last year, that came after Gottheimer spearheaded a successful effort to decouple the package from bipartisan infrastructure legislation that was ultimately signed by President Joe Biden.

Greenberg noted that now, everyone from Manchin to Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) "is ready to cut a deal on reconciliation, and understands the importance of raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations while lowering healthcare and energy costs for families."

"Gottheimer is just being a saboteur, totally captured by his financial sector donors, attempting to stop progress by throwing a tantrum," she continued. "He takes his cues from wealthy Wall Streeters who happen to have one of their multiple mansions in his New Jersey district. That's why it makes sense for him to throw sand in the gears of any bill that might make those mansion owners pay their fair share of taxes."

The Indivisible leader also argued that "Gottheimer is insulated from the actual political consequences of Democrats having no big legislative wins to run on in November" because of his wealthy donors, and called out reporters who have treated him "like a vulnerable frontline Democrat who's tapped into the working man's needs" while he "trashes activists and working-class communities who have come together to fight for Biden's economic agenda."

Sunrise Movement executive director Varshini Prakash similarly suggested that Gottheimer and any other right-wing Democrats again obstructing a reconcilation package focused on climate, prescription drug prices, and taxes could endanger their party's candidates across the country come November.

"To be clear, corporate 'centrists' are ruining the party and threatening Democratic seats in 2022," she said. "Sunrise and progressives have been fighting to pass Biden's agenda, while corporate 'centrists' are actively tanking it. We must ask ourselves why Rep. Gottheimer is working so hard to sabotage the party when he knows a climate and jobs bill would not only help communities across the country, but would help Democrats win seats this cycle."

Prakash pointed out that "Democrats are heading into November with a president with notably low approval ratings, a Congress that has not passed Build Back Better, and we are losing young and working people. If Democrats don't take action immediately, Republicans will win."

"In October 2021, 12 young volunteers with Sunrise were arrested for protesting Rep. Josh Gottheimer while demanding that he stop obstructing Build Back Better from passing," she recalled. "At the time, dozens of young people asked Rep. Gottheimer, 'Which side are you on?' We are still demanding answers."

Journalist David Roberts tweeted Wednesday that "Gottheimer being a titanic asshole is a good excuse to remind ourselves of the basic shape of Biden's presidency so far, namely: From the second he entered office, progressives have worked to support his agenda and 'moderates' have fucked him over."

Axios' revelations were followed by The Washington Post reporting Wednesday that Biden is considering breaking key climate pledges to win Manchin's support on a reconciliation package.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told the Post that "we do not negotiate in public but are dealing with lawmakers in good faith to pass legislation that will cut costs like prescription drugs and energy, lower the deficit by having the wealthy pay their fair share, and fight inflation for the long haul."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Jeffery Lamar Williams — the celebrated Atlanta trap recording artist better known as Young Thug — walked into Fulton County Jail in May to a standing ovation.

The arrest was an event. The jail, on Rice Street, shut down the intake of other arrestees to process him in. Atlanta’s city-contracted wrecker service diverted all its trucks to haul his many cars out of the rented property in Buckhead where police found him May 9. The entire city paused to take inventory on the massive gang arrest, with 27 other people — including a second superstar rapper, Sergio “Gunna” Kitchens.

Previous Fulton County prosecutors have been reluctant to invoke the law, concerned about the abuses of mass incarceration and its power to stigmatize Black defendants. But Atlanta today faces a rash of violence that distorts policies and murders good intentions.

While official claims about gang culpability for street violence ought to be taken with a grain of salt — such figures are often pulled out of thin air — Young Slime Life, the gang Williams is alleged to lead, left a trail of very real bodies, the victims of a seven-year gang feud.

Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis in her office on Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2022.

Photo: Ben Gray/AP

Should Black criminal enterprises be immune to drawing a RICO charge? The idea is fundamentally insulting.

Rapper YFN Lucci performs on Jan. 5, 2021, in Atlanta.

Photo: Paras Griffin/Getty Images

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“The statutes are stacked against us.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by George Chidi.

The New Zealand government is considering more action to crack down on violent gang behaviour but has dismissed the idea of a ban on wearing gang patches in public.

There have been a number of shootings and arson attacks in Auckland and Northland in recent weeks linked to escalating tensions between the Killer Beez and Tribesmen.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told Morning Report the government had asked police what other tools they wanted.

• LISTENING TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘We are moving as fast as we can’ – Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern

She said she expected to receive further advice soon.

She said changes had been made to widen the criteria for asset seizures and firearm prevention orders legislation was currently before select committee.

It was clear that the current outbreak of violence centred on escalating tensions between two gangs and the clear advice from experts was about the need “to come down hard on that behaviour”.

The police had taken such action with multiple arrests, multiple search warrants executed and 600 rounds of ammunition seized.

‘More tools needed?’
“We’ve asked them [police] to tell us in that environment are there more tools that you need,” she said.

The government had met them again last week and she was expecting more advice from them soon.

“We are moving as fast as we can where the police identify issues we can support them on.”

New policy would not go before cabinet later today — changes did not happen in a day or a week but the government was seeking to have the work expedited.

Asked if it would include increased stop and search powers and banning gang patches in public as suggested by opposition National Party leader Christopher Luxon on Saturday, she said the police were in the best position to identify what would work best.

“This idea of gang patch bans — it’s been tried in other countries. It’s often a reactionary response you can see from politicians and when they’ve gone back and looked at whether it’s made a difference, review after review in different parts, for instance in Australia, has proved it hasn’t.

“Why don’t we put our energy into things that are going to make a difference.”

She invited National to bring forward other ideas on what would help solve violence from gangs.

“We will be engaging in the ones that the police tell us will make the biggest difference.”

Asked about changes affecting Māori in particular, she said any proposed legislation always went through a Bill of Rights process.

“But what we also always factor in are New Zealanders’ rights and their sense of safety and at present we see an escalation in tensions between gangs. Their behaviour includes examples of blatant lawlessness and that needs to be addressed.”

Reception from new Australian government pleasing
Ardern has hailed her visit to Sydney as a “reset” of a trans-Tasman relationship which had soured in recent years — primarily over Australia’s intransigent stance on its “501” deportation policy.

Following talks with new Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, after which he said he had “listened” to New Zealand’s concern, Ardern said it was a significant improvement on any feedback she had received from Canberra previously.

She agreed Australia has stated its clear intention to continue to deport people which was exactly the same as New Zealand’s approach.

It was those “at the extreme end” of the spectrum who were in effect Australians with no connections to Aotearoa that the government was most concerned about being sent here, she said.

It had secured from Albanese a commitment to look at that aspect.

“We’ve not received a reception like that to these issues for a number of years.”

With a ministerial meeting due to be held in three weeks Ardern said she will be looking for signs of progress but it was too soon to expect a timeframe for action.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Last summer, a group of Democrats organized by New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer derailed President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda by successfully decoupling it from a bipartisan infrastructure bill.

The group was dubbed the “Unbreakable Nine.”  The bill, known as the Build Back Better Act, was paid for in part by tax increases on the wealthy and on private equity, and was opposed by the dark-money group No Labels, funded by private equity moguls and the extreme rich.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

We go to El Salvador for an update on how the government under President Nayib Bukele has arrested over 6,000 people since a 30-day state of emergency was imposed following a wave of violence. The state of exception has suspended freedom of assembly and weakened due process rights for those arrested, including an extension of how long people can be held without charge. Nelson Rauda, a journalist at the newspaper El Faro who has been a target of harassment and surveillance by the Salvadoran government, says the impact of the state of exception has a class divide. “If you have resources … you might go about the state of exception as if nothing is happening,” he says. “For the majority of the country which comes from the lower-income population, it’s been difficult. It’s military checkpoints and police checkpoints and stop-and-frisk.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

At about 3 p.m. on March 7, a man on a motorcycle fired multiple gunshots at the broadcaster’s office in Tegucigalpa, the capital, according to news reports and Radio Globo Director Hector Amador, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

Amador said that he was in the station’s parking lot when he heard the shots, which destroyed several windows of a neighboring shop but did not hit the office itself, which is on the building’s second floor.

No one was injured in the attack, Amador said. He added that police arrested one suspect on the night of March 7, and a second suspect, the alleged gunman, on March 8. Police have accused both men of being members of a local gang, according to those news reports.

“Honduran authorities must fully investigate the recent attack on Radio Globo, determine its motive, and bring all the perpetrators to justice, including whoever orchestrated the attack,” said Natalie Southwick, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator, in New York. “Radio Globo staff members were fortunate that nobody was hurt, but they must be able to work without fearing for their lives. Honduran authorities must show that such a brazen attack in broad daylight carries real consequences.”

Amador said that he called an emergency number run by the National Protection Mechanism for Journalists immediately after the attack, but no one answered. He then contacted Security Minister Ramon Sabillon, who sent a police team to open an investigation.

Radio Globo is a Tegucigalpa-based radio station that covers national news, politics, and sports, and produces the TV news channel Globo TV. Amador told CPJ he believed the attack may have been retaliation for the outlet’s coverage of extradition proceedings against former President Juan Orlando Hernández. Hernández was arrested in February and faces possible extradition to the United States on drug trafficking and weapons charges, according to news reports.

Amador said that the former head of the national police threatened legal proceedings against him in 2019 over the outlet’s coverage of his alleged links with drug trafficking.

When CPJ contacted Sabillon via messaging app for comment, he said he would respond to questions but did not do so by the time of publication. CPJ also messaged Danilo Morales, the director of the protection mechanism, but did not receive a response.

In 2019, Radio Globo Director David Romero  was sentenced to 10 years in prison for allegedly defaming a former prosecutor; he died of COVID in detention in July 2020.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Internal chat logs leaked from the notorious Russian ransomware gang Conti reveal unfiltered conversations between ultranationalist hackers in which they repeat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s conspiratorial lies about Ukraine, discuss the impact of early Western sanctions against their country, and make antisemitic comments about Ukraine’s Jewish president.

The logs were leaked late last month, reportedly by a Ukrainian security researcher, after Conti publicly announced its support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and threatened to retaliate against any cyber warfare targeted at the Russian-speaking world. The logs span two years and multiple chat services and were released alongside training documentation, hacking tools, and source code.

The Intercept reviewed the most recent month of logs, focusing on those originating from RocketChat, a group-chat system similar to Discord or Slack, that Conti hosted on the anonymity network Tor. The messages are full of typos, slang, and a heavy use of mat — vulgar Russian profanity. We translated these messages using Google Translate and DeepL, and then a native Russian speaker manually corrected them. As with any translations, there are sometimes multiple possible interpretations, so we are making the original Russian available here. All time stamps from chat messages are in Coordinated Universal Time.

Original statement from Conti

Screenshot by Check Point Research

Conti’s modified statement

Screenshot by Check Point Research

Russian Liberal Democratic Party Leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky attends a meeting of Russian President Vladimir Putin with lawmakers of the new convocation of the State Duma in Moscow, Russia on Dec. 10, 2021. Photo: Ramil Sitdikov/Sputnik via AP

Photo: Ramil Sitdikov/Sputnik via AP

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Micah Lee.